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4

Strategy implementation

Planning

Control

Execution

• Supply chain management strategies (Chs 7 and 8)

• Digital marketing strategies (Chs 8 and 9)

• Planning, scheduling and change management (Ch 10)

• Digital business analysis and design (Ch 11)

• Implementation, maintenance and control (Ch 12)

Implementation issues in later chapters

many existing companies invested in e-commerce without achieving a satisfactory return on 

investment. (The mini case study on Ecomum at the end of Chapter 2 gives a recent example 

of an e-retail failure with serious consequences.)

What then can be learnt from these? There are usually more fundamental problems result-

ing in failure of Internet companies. Miller (2003) has reviewed these misjudgements from 

an analysis of many Internet failures. He believes that the biggest mistake companies made 

was to ‘massively overestimate the speed at which the marketplace would adopt dot com inno-

vations’. Furthermore, it was assumed that new innovations would rapidly displace existing 

product offerings, for example online grocery shopping would rapidly replace conventional 

grocery shopping. Even Tesco.com, one of the most successful online retailers, achieves a 

 single-  digit percentage of its retail sales from the Internet – and this has taken several years to 

achieve. Other reasons mentioned by Miller include:

● 

Timing errors: for example, services for download of digital entertainment that were 

offered before  high-  speed broadband Internet access was widely available. The learning is 

that insufficient research had been conducted about demand for online products.

● 

Lack of creativity: many services copied existing business models, or other online retail 

services. The learning is that insufficient research had been conducted about competitor 

differentiators and capabilities and whether these would be sufficient to encourage con-

sumers to switch providers.

● 

Offering free services: many services were offered free to gain site visitors and registration, 

and it then became difficult to encourage payment for marginally better services. This is a 

difficult balance to get right.

● 

 Over-  ambition: to achieve investor funding amongst many competing companies, some 

entrepreneurs exaggerated the demand for their products and the growth.

Beyond these reasons, we can also point to classic mistakes that start-up and existing busi-

nesses have always made. These include:

● 

Situation analysis – insufficient rigour in researching demand for new products and com-

petitive forces.

● 

Objective setting – setting unrealistic objectives or, worse still, not setting clear objectives.

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Part 2  Strategy and applications

● 

Strategy definition – poor decisions about business and revenue models, target markets, 

product differentiation, pricing, distribution, etc.

● 

Implementation – problems with customer service quality, infrastructure and change 

management (described in Chapter 10).