Situation:  A company is in the process of shifting their business model to better address customer needs. They have three different models under consideration. Management is split between these models, but must arrive at a consensus. How do you optimize your business model?

Advice from the CEOs:

• Right now, you are considering three different potential models:
  • Tools – your old model
  • Data – produced by your old model
  • Service – your new model
  • These are different models with different prospects.

• The money makers in marketing focus on data, not tools. Data is information, and this is what is valuable to clients. If you want to focus on the data component of your offering.
• Currently, you are scraping data from social media and matching this to your client’s database on a real-time basis. There’s a model and value here because you are enhancing your client’s current database by making it more useful and actionable to them.
• You have tools to enable and add value to existing client databases by allowing them to better segment their database. Again, there is value here.
• Your core IP is the ability to correlate diverse data sources. Have you protected this IP? If not, this needs to be a top priority.
• How much information that you scrape from social media sources can you share without violating privacy? This is something to think about because people are becoming increasingly sensitive about companies collecting their private information.

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