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11/02/2022

Physical: Your Differentiator in a Digital World

How to stand apart from your peers

As renowned business futurist & uber-cool keynote speaker Kjell Nordstrom pronounced when I first experienced his cyborg-punk presence, way back in 2002: “your excellent website is no more a determinant of future success and competitive advantage than having functional toilets in your office”. 

Twenty years on, in the same vein, having a well-designed and adequately-funded digital strategy is going to be as essential as that prototypical website, but just as insufficient, for your association’s future success. 

Why? Because every company and association is now in the midst of becoming digitally competent and competitive, and this process will only accelerate as the tools to achieve this become cheaper and ever more sophisticated. Pricing will become even more transparent than today; products and services will be capable of almost instant deconstruction and replication; content and expertise will become unconstrained by geography or institution; hyper-competition will be ubiquitous. And users, consumers, members will have incredible choice at their fingertips, as individually-customized messages and offerings become the norm from every organization they interact with. Any association’s claimed digital differentiators will be subject to inevitable, inexorable erosion.This is why, alongside a great digital strategy, associations need to consciously design and invest in an equally sophisticated, complementary physical strategy, and not simply treat these activities as the vestiges of an outdated, analogue world that is receding in our rear-view mirrors. 

Please select this link to read the complete article from Boardroom.

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