Characteristics of Digital Leadership

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.