Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Defining digital leadership
What is Digital leadership? Digital leadership is the discipline of navigating an organization towards digital transformation in order to stay competitive and agile in a rapidly evolving digital and social media landscape.
Digital transformation needs to be a part of your organizational culture. If it’s something that you’re trying to tag on, or if it’s something that you’re putting a 20-year-old intern in charge of, then it won’t be properly embedded or understood within your company.
The role of a digital leader
As a digital leader, you will:
- Set the vision
- Influence executives and stakeholders
- Create sustainable digital programs
- Hire A-players
- Define processes for digital excellence
- Track impact
- Optimize and continually improve
Characteristics of an effective digital leader
An effective digital leader is someone who:
- Leads
- Inspires
- Educates
- Enables
- Empowers
- Fosters partnerships
- Is accountable
Case study: Burberry
Burberry in 2006 was an organization that was markedly underperforming against its peer group. It brought in a visionary digital leader, Angela Ahrendts, to help recover the group and she did so through the use of digital transformation. In particular, she implemented the following changes:
- Re-aligned Burberry to target the millennial audience. This enabled digital to play a much larger role.
- Re-launched the brand in a digitally savvy way based on what consumers wanted.
- Brought out the essence of the brand through digital and music.
- Re-designed the online and offline journey to be seamless. The in-store experience was like walking into their website.
- Set the pace and vision that digital was a way of life at Burberry.
Kristin Shine
Kristin Shine is Founder and General Manager of Shine Healthcare and Science Consulting. She advises clients in the healthcare space on digital strategy development, business development, strategic communications, and commercial partnerships.
