Digital is not an afterthought
Om Malik (@om) has a wonderful post today about Angela Ahrendts (@AngelaAhrendts), chosen by Apple CEO Tim Cook to head Apple’s retail and online businesses.
The reason Ahrendts, former CEO of Burberry, was chosen to lead both lines of Apple’s business? Her total embrace of digital across all business processes, including marketing and business development. There’s not an offline world and online world, they are one in the same to Ahrendts.
Malik believes Ahrendts could be just the spark the company needs. Despite the bounce Apple received with the recent iPhone 5s, revenues and profits per store are down and the company feels a adrift. Malik even speculates that Ahrendts, who will serve as Senior VP, could be a future CEO candidate.
Though some fashion retailers have been struggling, Malik reports Burberry’s stock rose 250% and become a $3 billion a year fashion colussus with 530 stores during Ahrendts’ tenure.
What seperated Ahrendts from her peers in the fashion industry was her total embrace of technology.
Burberry became an early adopter of whatever new cool thing that came around — it was an early convert to the potential of Instagram, for example. But more importantly, it weaved digital into its entire business processes, making Facebook, Twitter and Google as much a part of its growth strategy as advertising in the glossy magazines. (emphasis added)
As Ahrendts told Imran Amred (@imranamedt) of Business of Fashion in an interview last month,
Now, everybody is a digital customer, so doing things digitally is no longer a niche [play]. Doing things digitally is how the entire world communicates. That’s our language today. Digital is not an afterthought. Our design teams design for a landing page and the landing page dictates what the store windows will look like, not the other way round. In creative media, they’re shooting for digital, then we are turning it back to physical. We knew every pound we spent digitally, we could potentially get ten times the reach that we could get physically. (emphasis added)
I can’t help but see a lesson for law firms here.
Does your law firm look at the offline world and the online world as one and the same? Do you look at your clients and prospective clienst as digital clients with whom relationships must be nurtured through social media?
Ahrendts looks at social media as much a part of a company’s growth strategy as offline marketing and business development. Does your law firm? Does your law firm spend equal sums on social media as on other forms of business development? Does your law firm’s managing partner or chair lead innovation through their personal use of social media like Ahrendt does?
Many law firms are struggling. A failure to look at digital and social media as the way the whole world communicates like Ahrendts does could be a dereliction of duty by the leadership of these firms. Digital is not an afterthought.