文档介绍：Perspectives
REPRINT N° 383
Thinking Strategically About E- businesses, far more profitability derives from
influencing navigation than from any other
Commerce activity. Companies have three basic ways to
capture that profitability: reach, affiliation, and
richness.
The first generation of merce has
been a land grab. Strategy has ranked peting on Reach
below tactics—and tactics below experimentation.
That phase ing to an end. We are entering Reach is about access and connection: how
the second generation of merce. The key many customers a business can access and how
players—branded goods suppliers, physical many products it can offer. Before merce,
retailers, electronic retailers, pure navigators— retail peted brilliantly on reach
must now shift their attention from claiming by offering broad selection and convenient
territory to defending or capturing it. In other locations. But they were limited by the
words, they must focus on strategies to achieve economics of things. The largest physical
competitive advantage. bookstore in the United States carries about
250,000 titles. , by contrast, offers
The battlefield petitive advantage will million and is “located” on some 25 million
be won or lost is navigation—how puter screens.
search, compare, and decide what to buy. In the
physical world, consumers have such a hard Unconstrained by physical limita