Editable Google Slide (CC-BY-4.0)
In a world, where business models and USPs are too easy to copy, there are 3 types of long-term games companies try to play. Which game do you play?
Disclaimer: The games are not mutually excluding. And the framework is supposed to be provocative, not limiting.
Amazon, for instance, plays all three (cloud services being mostly a commodity game, Kindle being a mostly a brand game, and Amazon store being a marketplace game).
Red Bull, on the other hand, is clearly focusing on the pure brand game (with the launch of its media house), and we can imagine it becoming even product-neutral at some point, like Hello Kitty.
Hotels for too long have been focused on their brand games and this allowed Booking.com and later (and better) Airbnb to crash into the marketplace game out of the blue.
The open question for us is whether there are games radically different from these 3?
We’re also curious whether more industries will move into open and transparent marketplaces over time and whether current big players will manage to become the enablers of these marketplaces or not.