Digital Business

Four keys to attracting customers

I wrote some time ago an article called ‘How to Win – Focus and Speed‘ which was about strategy in business. I use it all the time in my business life and it does work. I read an article today by John Sviolka which reminded of that approach in business planning which talks about an online voucher company in the USA which has differentiated itself very clearly from its competition by doing  just that.

It has been so successful that it has accumulated 675,000 subscribing customers to its service since November 2008 and it is growing them at a rate of 40% to 50% per month. It has a very clear proposition and it works. The lessons it teaches in this competitive market are clear and can be used by any consumer facing business.

Read the article here. You won’t regret it.

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Generation M wants to be great at doing stuff that matters

Before you get upset by my heading, I really do mean this as a personal comment. I know several people, including friends, who have been badly affected by the recession in their businesses. I too have had a couple of tough years, most of which came from starting a business at the beginning of 2008 which is still going but for which I am no longer working on.

Bad timing, perhaps, and the recession did not help. The business strategy was ambitious. We were taking a new product to markets we thought we knew well but the clients were cautious and they did not buy as much as we thought despite the benefits available to them. I have learnt a lot in the last two years of my business life and my home life.

One of the main consequences of the business last year is that I have had to look through my personal finances to adjust my lifestyle according to my funds. And it has been a valuable exercise in highlighting how inefficient my household had been in the last ten years with the way we were spending money.

For example, we had borrowed money to extend our current house in a modest way. It improved the house, for sure, but the house has a limit to what people were prepared to pay for it and the growth in the equity has not improved enough to have made it worthwhile. We are selling our house and moving, hopefully, into a new town house which has energy bills half that of our current house. We will drop our mortgage by £100,000 by moving into the new house and it feels good.

Furthermore, it will save us having to drive our children from our current village house to school in town. The children can now walk to school and we save a lot of money on petrol.

Also, I have downsized my car to a car which does 70 miles per gallon (mpg) and 80 mpg if I drive a little more carefully. What was I doing beforehand in a car which only managed 25 mpg? Also, the tax on it is much lower than the previous car.

I admit that I am now becoming a bit obsessive about what I use day to day and I question even the humblest products and their value. For instance, why the heck do I need a razor which has five blades? How close can a razor get before it starts taking your face off anyway? Two blades are fine and the shaving foam I use now is a supermarket brand which is a third of the price of the branded equivalent and just as good. I don’t seem to be the only one either who is changing their ways either. Caroline Eveleigh at Anatec Software and Systems is doing the same with her lighting.

The main point is that we will soon have a great deal more ‘disposable income’ so that our family can invest in the really valuable things in life such as giving our children the best education we can, investing money for the long term, and actually having some fun.

And this is what we are doing in our business, of which I am now a part, too. We question the value of all of our investments very closely. We are investing in the skills of the team. We are investing in building relationships with our new and existing clients. We are making sure we have some fun as business too.

And as the tough conditions continue for businesses and people alike, it seems like their is change in the atmosphere in how people perceive their environment. Umair Haque wrote a very interesting article where he pointed out a change in society in a group which he calls ‘Generation M‘. Generation M is searching for greater meaning in a world which is “full of big, fat, lazy business” but which is seeking “small, responsive, micro-scale commerce“.

I am part of Generation M. I have moved out of big business and into small business where I can make a difference. I am glad that I am downsizing so I am no longer burdened with an oppressive mortgage. I don’t buy products which purport to make me a better human being because the brand tells me so. I am buying products which do a good job and no more. I am getting my life back and getting some meaning into it so that I can enjoy what I do, spend time with my family and friends and just enjoy a simpler life.

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2-D codes are far more important than you may think

QR Codes don’t connect offline media to online media. They are far bigger than that. 2-D codes, QR codes, Microsoft Tag, Nokia Point & Find are talked about in articles I read and articles I write in a very tactical way.

‘Where can you use them?‘, ‘How can you use them?‘, ‘What do they do?‘. These are all valid questions which people ask now while people become aware of them in the world excluding Japan, which has been using the technology for a while.

But something has always been missing when I think about how I could use them in the business I work in to generate revenue. By their nature, 2-D codes are simple to set up and pretty much free to use. The value our business would get from them is in developing mobile web sites for clients, of course. But, my business is a digital agency. We don’t do print.

But this morning, I had a meeting with a local creative agency I know through a business networking group. I was asking them for some quotes and feedback on some projects I am working on, when I started talking to them about 2-D codes. They had never heard of them. I explained what they were and that’s when it hit me.

The bigger picture for 2-D codes is the opportunity they represent to connect partners together to develop solutions for our clients. Not only do they connect offline media to online media. They connect service providers together too in new ways to provide new solutions and approaches to clients and their customers.

When you look at 2-D codes this way, you have the opportunity to expand beyond the limitations of your own business by working with other service providers. Suddenly, a potentially sceptical creative print company to our digital agency becomes a partner.

Of course, there is still some way to go before 2-D Codes become commonplace here in the UK, but working like this with them will make the technology more tangible for clients who increasingly want to reach their customers in ways which suit them and not ways which suit the company.

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How does your business feel?

A few businesses appear as though they are instant winners. Some take a while to build themselves up to success. Some start with a great idea but burn out quickly as the idea does not translate itself into a commercially viable product or service (I remember meeting someone in a pub in the late ’90′s who was setting up dotcom company which was delivering a clean shirt, pants, socks, a razor and toothbrush to a customer’s office after a night on the town).

I spent some time with a business this evening which had got the ingredients right on its product. One of the keys for this business to get right was how it felt when you walked in through the front door. It felt right. It felt relaxed, welcoming, warm but not hot. It smelt right and you felt as though you were completely welcome. The business is a spa, The Grange Spa, in Lincolnshire.

It is an oasis in this very rural county. The nearest competition is about an hour away. The couple that own it, Matt & Emma Craven, are warm and welcoming. Behind their friendly exteriors are sharp marketing minds that know exactly who they are aiming at as ideal customers. Matt told me precise socio-demographic characteristics of each segment of the population they are targeting.

They started in April 2009 and “footfall” is starting to increase through their doors, finally. It’s tough but it is starting to work. Clients were walking in as we spoke having treatments, using the gym and swimming in their gorgeous pool. Matt uses Twitter and Facebook to help him reach out to potential clients.

But, these social media tools are not necessarily being used by some of their ideal customers. Nevertheless, many of their prospective customers network socially albeit not through the internet but at book clubs. Women with children in their mid to late thirties.

So, Matt and I got chatting about the possibility of combining their spa with women’s book clubs. The spa has beautiful furniture and private areas where a women’s book club could meet to talk about this month’s book, chat and then spend an hour using the spa. We then talked about the joy of using Google Chrome which is when Emma seemed to switch off for some reason.

But more, importantly, take a look at The Grange Spa’s web site and see for yourself at what this oasis offers and how it feels. If you get a chance, swing by and say hello to Matt, Emma or any of their friendly staff to sense for yourself just how good their business feels. If you have your own business, then ask yourself how it feels. Does it feel right? If not, make some changes. It’s important for your customers.

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Bumbling along is actually a strategy for making changes

If you ever caught yourself that you were just bumbling along in your business, unsure of quite how you made your job or your business successful, then stop that thinking right away. You may start each day with a plan. But, when you look reflect  on the day, you are highly likely to see that, despite achieving a lot, it was not quite what you set out to do that day. Your time might have been spent fixing problems, making decisions, helping team members and coming up with ideas.

According to Professor Tony Watson of the Nottingham University Business School, whom I listened to today on the East Midlands Development Agency’s ‘High Growth Masterclass’ course today, this is not just bumbling along in business. It is actually part of a natural strategy for implementing change in your business task by task each day and which is called ‘logical incremental-ism‘.

We often think that we have to make huge changes in a business to make a difference. Often, we do have to make big changes, such as identifying your company’s points of differentiation in the market and promoting them. But more often, we make changes little by little, moment by moment for the better to achieve change and success in the business.

So, we can now relax in the knowledge that we are making changes everyday in our lives, improving our proposition and products to meet the demands of our clients. It might feel as though we are just getting through each day but it is much more than that. We are unconsciously implementing a strategy of change without noticing it.

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Show your boss the evidence and make it real

I realised that I first learned how to sell a few years after I first did it. I was a young British Army Officer and one of my jobs in the Mess was to have all of our dining room chairs restored. The chairs were getting battered by many functions and daily use by thirty blokes and their occasional guests. I took one chair as a sample to a local furniture restorer to be restored and took it back into the Mess to gain the approval of the senior officers before having all of them restored.

But I didn’t just show them the restored chair. Firstly, I showed them a chair which had not been restored and which was probably the worst one of our set. The unrestored chair was rickety and had had much of the varnish chipped off. I showed the group of senior officers how bad things were but how good that they could be by investing in having the chairs restored. Having the chairs restored was a whole lot cheaper than buying a complete new set. Approval was gained.

One of the biggest challenges that some employees or even business directors face is having to convince their boss or fellow directors that they need to invest money into their project. Most people fear the rejection or fail to persuade their boss or bosses on why the investment is an investment and not a gamble.

I met someone recently who is facing this challenge. Their business is a web based news site which focuses on a science and technology. It has grown its unique visitors to the site from 6,500 per month to nearly 15,000 in the last year. It has benefited in the economic downturn, it would seem, as people seek more knowledge and information.

On the outside, it appears that this is a good news story. But, the underlying trends on the site show that people are spending less time on the site. The site is very much a ‘broadcast’ site meaning that it does not have capabilities for viewers to interact with the site by way of leaving comments, sharing articles with friends or colleagues, or even posting other content onto the site such as photographs.

Its competitors are large. One of their competitors has fifty times the number of unique visitors per month to their site. The competitors’ site is more advanced by way of tools which allow visitors to subscribe to the web site through RSS feeds, to read blogs, or to download and listen to podcasts, for example. Not only are their competitors larger, they are competing more effectively for the visitors by providing reasons for them to keep them coming back.

Herein lies the problem with the smaller news site. They have an infrastructure to their site which is bespoke and they are finding it nearly impossible to change. Furthermore, the owners of the web site do not see the problem. They see rising visitor numbers and they have achieved their original aim of setting up a successful web site providing the specialist news. “Why should we change the infrastructure?”

The infrastructure they have is bespoke and there very few people who can develop their system to customise it and add new features. They are stuck with a single supplier who charges them a lot of money to maintain but not develop and expand the capabilities of the site.

The owners are not seeing that their web site will become soon see the number of visitors declining because they receive better services and news elsewhere. The people in charge of marketing and running the site don’t have the support of the owners to make changes because the owners don’t think there is a problem. So, the status quo prevails and when the number of visitors and subscribers decline, they won’t be able to react. This is a classic case of people not worrying about what a rising tide covers up until the tide turns.

How do you deal with this inertia? How do you show that something is wrong when all seems to be rosy when your boss doesn’t believe it? Think back to the chairs earlier. Everyone in the mess was uses to the chairs being a bit battered or wobbly. Nobody was really complaining about them. But, by showing them how good they could be and how much more presentable and professional our Mess would appear, the senior officers approved the investment. They did not care how the chairs were restored as long as they were done professionally.

This is similar to the situation with the contact I met who was struggling with their bosses to see that their web site was not competitive. You have to show them evidence and keep showing them and not just accept the status quo and the inevitable pain they would go through again if they did not change their infrastructure. You need to show them what their competitors are doing. You need to show them what real people want and then how that will help their business survive. It’s tough but evidence and outcomes are very persuasive. You need to be bold, strong and persistent.

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Getting leads does not have to be costly

All businesses need sales. It’s probably the most important activity to keep a business alive. With profitable sales, cash flow is the next most important aspect to get right. Most large businesses (e.g. Microsoft and HP) I have worked in have the luxury of being able to test marketing initiatives and they have vast armies of sales and marketing people to develop, test and refine them, along with the budget to do it.

In a small business, you don’t have such luxuries unless you happen to be swimming in cash. Most people start their own business with plenty of determination, some cash to keep themselves afloat, a great idea and the experience to be able to help other people with it, and, perhaps, a list of contacts who they can approach who might want to buy their product or service. Resources for sales and marketing are limited so every penny has to count towards getting sales.

Learning how to sell can often be the hardest part of starting your own business. The fear of rejection. The fear of failure. These are all common anxieties that occur when you are about to either pick up the phone to speak to a prospect, run your first show stand or talk to people at an event who you don’t already know. But you can break these fears and anxieties down by following simple steps in your business planning and not be tempted into sales and marketing activities that don’t fit into your plans.

When it comes to marketing, I hear plenty of worrying stories about business owners who have been recommended to get a web site for their business to bring in sales which, in the end, brings in no leads and, of course, no sales but takes vital cash out of their business. Also, people are often tempted to buy lists of names who are supposed to be qualified prospects in their target market at great expense but which can often be found for free on the internet using business networking sites like LinkedIn.

Often this comes down to a lack of experience in sales and marketing, which is understandable when these are not your main skills. But, when you start your business, you have to become good at sales and marketing to survive and get yourself into a position to grow your business and make profits.

When you have limited or near-zero marketing funds, then you need to be laser targeted in how you use them to bring you fruitful leads which convert into sales. You need to be clear about the objectives for your marketing. You need to be clear about your sales objectives too. Once you have determined your sales and marketing objectives, then you can begin to work on your sales and marketing strategies.

Sales objectives might sound like this: “To cover my costs each month and to pay myself a living wage, I need to bring in £5,000 of sales per month”. And it might follow on like this: “In order to bring in £5,000 of sales per month, I need to sell two of my widgets per month”.

Sales strategies might sound like this: “To sell two widgets per month, I need to send ten quotes out per month”. Sales tactics might sound like this: “To send out ten quotes per month, I need to make fifty contacts with new prospects or customers per month“.

Marketing objectives might sound like this: “I want to become the first choice when clients need an HR consultant in my local town within two years”.

Marketing strategies might sound like this: “I want to meet one new prospect a week who is in my target market”. A marketing tactic for this strategy might be “To meet one new prospect per week I am going to join my local business networking group”.

Only when you have planned your sales & marketing objectives and strategies, can you start to decide on the right tactics to achieve them. This is where many people starting up their own business start. They start with sales tactics and marketing tactics without fully understanding how they support their strategies and objectives.

For instance, you might say I want to build a web site to sell to new customers. But do your customers buy your type of product or service through the web? This is where your precious resources can be wasted in an instant.

So, before you spend anything, ask yourself how sure am I that I will get any business from this? If, for instance, you are buying a list, check on the web to see if your potential clients can be found for free. Before you build your web site, make sure it supports your strategies.

In my experience in owning and running small businesses, you should keep everything simple, focus on what you do best and learn how to sell. You need two types of lead generating tactics to get you sales. Tactics which can offer you quick access to prospects (e.g. your existing contact list or contact details from tools like LinkedIn), and tactics which can offer you an opportunity to build long term networks of leads (e.g. networking at events or business clubs).

These two are the cheapest and most secure ways to get leads and sales into your business and they are based upon relationships. You need to convince people that you are trustworthy. With short term tactics, it is good to have a nice logo and a well designed web site. They instill confidence in prospects that you are serious.

But, you should not spend more than you can afford until you have enough money to develop them into more sophisticated tools. Keep it simple. Use the great tools which are out there on the web to help you connect to customers which are free and adapt them cheaply. Keep the cash in your business for as long as you can.

You don’t need to spend lots of money on marketing at first. You need to spend lots of time finding prospects and working with existing clients. Always ask yourself how sure you about the return you will get from your sales and marketing investment and whether it supports your plans. Trust your instincts and be firm about how you invest your resources.

If you keep these principles in mind, you can generate good business without spending lots of money.

If you would like to contact me for further consultancy on how you can get leads to your business at low cost, then please email me: will@digitalbusinessblog.co.uk

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Let's not rush to change until we know what we want

In June 1944, the Allies had landed on the beaches at Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword and were advancing inland fighting against mainly battle hardened German troops who had fought on the Eastern Front. On the east flank of the allied invasion, Montgomery’s objective was to capture and liberate the city of Caen within the first 24 hours. This objective was not achieved. It took far longer to achieve. Part of this was due to the fact that the British and Canadian troops were facing the near fanatical ‘SS Panzer “Hitlerjugend”‘ division who fought hard (and committed atrocities against the Canadian troops). Montgomery bombarded the Germans in Caen, encircled the city and, eventually, the Germans capitulated or withdrew. 

Caen was flattened. By flattening the city, Montgomery not only made it harder for his troops to move into Caen, he made it easier for the Germans to defend. But, the main losers in this battle were the civilians. Thousands of civilians died and the German Army withdrew to continue its bloody defence all the way to Berlin.

While we remember the heroism and atrocities of that campaign, and while we have lived with the benefits that came from the defeat of Nazism, we are now in a time a huge turmoil and opportunity. A small minority of greedy people have smashed the world’s economy to pieces, the wave of which we were happily riding the decade before. The British political system has had six weeks of revelations from which the ‘Freedom of Information Act’ has highlighted the irresponsibility of a small group of our society’s leaders who lost sight of the meaning of serving their people. 

However, like Montgomery bombing Caen to pieces, the Press needs to balance their power of information with the need to  think rationally about what we would like to replace what is now being destroyed. We run the risk of throwing out a group of individuals and replacing them with individuals and policies which are based upon a wave of emotional anger and not rational thought and reason. 

Sure, let’s have an election, but not until we have got this mess sorted out. Sure, let’s get rid of those shysters who have defrauded the system. But let’s not rush into anything before we know what we want and replace the current system with a bunch of inexperienced nitwits who sail in on a single issue but who have no depth to their capabilities. 

So, when we remember the heroics of Major John Howard and his men who landed in gliders 47 metres away from their target and swept away the old system at Pegasus Bridge, let us not forget that Howard and his men had trained for months for that moment. And we must do the same in this tumultuous time. Let’s sweep away the old ways but let’s not rush into it and pave the way for greater difficulties later on through a rushed and bungled reaction.

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Start at the bottom to see realities

Received wisdom says that you should hand wash your car from the top to bottom. You start by rinsing your car and loosening off the dirt. Then you get a sponge, dip it into a bucket of warm water containing that special car shampoo and start to wash the top of the car and work your way down. The problem with this method is that at the end of the whole process you can see where you missed with the sponge by the scattering of dirty patches around the car. It’s infuriating. 

Much the best way to hand wash your car is to start washing it from the bottom to the top of the car. You can see exactly where you have washed or not and you don’t get fooled by by your soap suds dripping over patches of dirty bodywork making them look as though you have cleaned them. It seems odd and I have had occasional mocking rebukes from friends saying I am talking rubbish. But it works.

So, what the heck has this got to do with cash flow? 

Anyone who has ever run a business will know that cash flow is one of the most important aspects of financial planning to get right to enable your business to survive. Get your cash flow wrong and your business dies. You might have orders in the pipeline, purchase orders and sales coming in. But, if the cash is not coming in and cash is going out faster than it comes in then a business that looks profitable on paper will go bust quickly. (If you want an example of a near miss for a business that could have gone bust then read my earlier article about a small business I know that could have easily gone bust).

When you put together a cash flow forecast on a spreadsheet, received wisdom will, generally, tell you to start at the top of the spreadsheet with your sales and other income each month for the first year. You might even forecast your sales or the first few months on week by week basis . Then you are told to write out your variable costs (those costs which increase depending on the number of sales of your product or service that you sell) into the cash  flow forecast for each month. And, then you add in your fixed costs for each month such as your rent, broadband costs, and salaries, for example.

At the bottom of the spreadsheet, using some simple formulas, you subtract your fixed and variable costs for each month from your monthly forecasted sales income. This then gives you a figure of how much cash will come in and out of your business bank account each month. It shows you how much money you need to fund your business at the start-up stage. It is likely that your cash flow will show that more money will go out in the first few months of your business than will come in. This is very important to understand.

But it is wrong. 

By starting at the top with your sales income, you start the whole process of building your cash flow forecast on a false premise. A fantasy. Forecasting your sales income is the most difficult thing to do and starting at the top of the spreadsheet is a massive mistake. You will fall into the trap of entering sales income figures which look right rather than those that are possible. And when you finish putting together your cash flow forecast, you sit back and feel good because your spreadsheet shows that you have a great business idea which is going to make you lots of profits. You start your business full of cheer and six months later you wonder what happened to your great business idea as it collapses around you.

You can avoid this trap. You avoid it by putting together a cash flow forecast from the bottom up in the spreadsheet. Costs to your business are definite. Sales income is a ghost at this stage. You can find out exactly how much everything will cost you down to the last penny. Find a sense of interest and intrigue in discovering your costs to your business each month that others will find baffling. Because finding certainty in your costs is the only sure thing which you can do for your business finances at this stage. 

When you have done this and used your simple formulas to work out your fixed costs and the costs you will incur when you do sell a product, which will be your variable costs, you can begin to work out what you need to sell and when you need the cash to come in to cover your costs. When you know this, you can work out how you will get your sales. This is sales strategy. You can research your potential customers. You can ask them if they would buy your product. You can work out if your product or service is too expensive or too cheap. You can work out what else you will need to do to sell and market your product or service. 

When you know these highly important details, you will know whether your business idea is not just a good idea but something which you will be able to sell profitably. You will save yourself a lot of trouble and money too.  

And why should you believe me? Because I started a business with a cash flow forecast at the top of the spreadsheet and completely overestimated how much I could sell and underestimated when the cash would come in. The business went bust. It was painful but it taught me the right way to plan a business and its cash flow forecast.

So, when you are next planning  to start a business and you are planning your cash flow, take a few moments out and hand wash your car. But do it from the bottom to the top. You won’t miss anything then and you will see that the received wisdom of hand washing cars the other way round is wrong. And then go back inside and do the same with your cash flow forecast.

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Exclusively everywhere

The publishing world is going mad. Digital technology is disrupting everything that they used to hold dear. Newspaper publishers are seeing their printed paper circulations dropping,  along with the advertising revenues that went with them. At the same time, having given away their online versions for free and keeping them subsidised by the online advertising, the online revenues are not keeping pace with the decline of the offline versions. This is not news and it is well documented in the well written article about the demise of the newspaper as we know it by Clay Shirky. 

There is a lot of talk in the publishing world about what the industry does not want to be. It does not want to be like the music industry which is trying to keep up with its customers who want to download music. The publishing industry does not want to lose control of its content. It does not want to see authors going direct to consumers and negating the need for their editorial, production and marketing skills. Nor does it want to be in the situation of the newspaper publishers. 

The publishing industry is in a position where devices are starting to become good enough for people to buy eBooks in significant numbers now and publishers are becoming increasingly anxious to adapt to the changing scene amongst their consumers. Their concerns over which format to use and which device will be the ‘killer device’ are growing. Unlike the music industry, publishers have never needed to think about which device to publish their books for. The device was the paper and print. If you publish regluar novels which just has text and no illustrations there is one format for you. If you publish cookbooks, for example, then you need a format which can handle the more complex text and images.

Amazon looks like it will introduce its Kindle 2 device into the UK soon for which publishers will have to provide their eBooks in various formats for Amazon to add in its own digital rights management. Waterstones favours the Sony Reader device and they require eBooks delivered in a format which only really suits novels which contain plain text. There are numerous eBook reading devices on the market and several different formats into which a book can be turned into an eBook. 

Publishers are now having to adapt their skills in print to digital skills to ensure that they are prepared for when their sales of digital books move from being a noticeable item on their top line to a significant part of their bottom line. And, instead of thinking about what they don’t want to be, they should start to think about what they want to be. And there is a model which they should consider.

Computer games developers and publishers have always needed a device to be purchased on which their games can be played. In the early days, it was a computer. Then specialised devices came along and the manufacturers of the devices started to battle it out for domination and Sony was the early winner with the Playstation. Microsoft brought out the Xbox and Nintendo discovered a new market with the Wii. 

But the games publishers and developers learnt fairly early on that the platform did not affect their development and publishing of games. The games developers (the equivalent of authors) created ever more immersive and graphically stunning games to make the most of the power of the games consoles which could be played on either an Xbox or a Playstation. They just developed ‘compiler’ programmes and ‘architectures’ through which their games adapted to the platform for which they had been purchased. Games publishers want to be able to distribute their games onto as many platforms as they can.

The good thing about books unlike a newspaper is that they are likely to be read again. Not read as many times, perhaps, as often as a track is played on a MP3 player, but an eBook has a longer life than a newspaper article, nevertheless. A game is likely to be played several times before it swapped or exchanged. Of course, most games come on a disc. But, increasingly, games are being played online and soon they will be downloaded to consoles when broadband speeds increase. So, in that sense, publishers will be ahead of games developers. 

A game can be rented from Blockbuster for a few nights, or purchased from the store or online. eBooks will need to be adaptable enough to allow different forms of ownership and payment such as borrowing from a library, renting from an online store, as well a perpetual licence when bought outright. 

Book publishers should think like this too. They just need to carry on finding good authors, and marketing the books well and let the device manufacturers fight it out amongst themselves on which device will be the most popular. In the meantime, they need to grow their digital capability to be able to deliver eBooks in several different formats and study how companies like EA Games work to get some ideas.

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