Why Some Businesses Fail at Transformation

Bigger is usually better, or at least that’s often been the assumption. Established companies clearly have the resources, the experience, and the skills of seasoned marketers, or they wouldn’t have endured. And yet they are often the most at risk when it comes to market disruption. That disruption has never been as fast and as wide ranging as it is today.

So why are larger organizations being bested by companies that are brand new to the market, often run by young teams with limited resource and experience? It’s not due to arrogance or a lack of ambition, nor do the disruptors have some kind of magic dust. It is often something much more mundane that is holding legacy companies back. They are simply being held back by the daily grind.

Disruption Defied by the Daily Grind

In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Pascal Finette, chair of entrepreneurship and open innovation at Singularity University, explained the various reasons why these businesses find transformation so difficult. The fact that it is not just one change but many all at once is one reason, and finding that the things they’re good at rapidly becoming obsolete was another. But, ultimately, Finette revealed that to innovate for the future meant spending time actively thinking about it. But, he added: “The day-to-day is eating most of them up.”

While Finette reserves his comments for company leadership, the same can be said for everyone in a legacy company. There are so many processes to follow, hierarchies to navigate, and increasingly outmoded channels that few people can get out of the daily grind long enough to gaze into the future and lend some thought as to what changes might be necessary to their survival.

The problem is that the organic growth that has so sustained larger businesses as they took more and more of their relevant markets, has left a tangle of resources and technologies that they are often unable or unwilling to unravel.

They are unable to do so because the connections between these different silos and databases have become so convoluted that it can be hard to see where one relationship starts and another ends. Their unwillingness, on the other hand, can stem from the significant amount of investment which will have been pumped over the years into the existing systems and processes. This combination can lead to an understandable reluctance to even discuss change.

In sharp contrast, start ups have the luxury of being able to invest in systems that are both recent and tailored to the job in hand, and so can get on with ideating, failing fast, and then improving to move forward swiftly. But while incumbents don’t appear to have such room to maneuver, they can increasingly access integrated and flexible solutions that can help them become transformation powerhouses.

Liberate the Day to Day for Transformation

The key to transformation is efficiency. This means finding ways to centralize, automate, or otherwise streamline critical but repetitive and time consuming tasks. This is what liberates people to find the space to transform.

Thanks to a range of cloud, software-as-a-service and API led solutions, companies don’t have to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ and unravel or remove existing systems. They simply begin to work in tandem with them. This is the case for censhare’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, which onboards and organizes a company’s assets, storing them in a centralized hub for easy and efficient access across the organization. Breaking down those silos…

A DAM can drive efficiencies across the board. By attaching metadata to assets, the system can identify and remove duplicates, organize assets by campaign, rights use and department, and link to other assets to give users a context for each asset across a comprehensive suite of brand approved assets, such as images, text, videos and more, with which to build campaigns across a number of platforms.

In this way, centralization reduces cost and drives efficiency. By removing duplications, eradicating rights issues, and reducing time spent working on projects, responsiveness is improved and costs decreased across a variety of use cases. As a basic example, users can find the asset they need quickly and easily, as well as speeding up project approvals and reducing errors through a collaborative workflow process, managed in real time. Automation and AI technology can even lead teams to discover new campaign directions and uses for assets that hadn’t previously been considered.

Once companies have freed up time and resources through the streamlining of the day to day, they can begin to carve out that essential space to foster transformational ideas. For instance, companies using censhare have reported a variety of impressive business results directly attributed to using a centralized DAM, including a 75% increase in efficiency, 68% faster content production, and even yearly cost savings of $275,000 just from the reuse of assets rather than creating them afresh.

To find out more about how DAM systems work, how they integrate with existing platforms and where they can drive efficiencies in your organization, tune in to our latest on demand webinar, Turn Your Digital Assets into Powerful Marketing Content - Introduction to censhare DAM, or read more about how other clients have used censhare to accelerate their digital marketing here.