A diarchy is a form of governing by two rulers, diarchies are known for instance from ancient Sparta and Rome and is one of the oldest types of government.
The Spartan diarchy is suggested to be a solution for: a struggle between two Spartan families or to stay away from an absolutistic ruling.
The distribution of power amongst content and context is meant to prevent a struggle between two forces and meant to avoid focus of attention and power of either content or context exclusively. Emphasis, focus and importance on both intertwined is the key.
When reflecting on diarchies and thinking about it in relation to the current phase of the Internet evolution, not only the Content is King (as often is written), but the Context needs to be acknowledged and treated equally influencing as the second valid King in the diarchal rulership over the Internet and business landscape.
This evolution is certainly not new, business already undergo these transitional phases.
First there was the production oriented era, then the sales oriented era (think of Ford and his quote in his autobiography “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black“). Then came the realization and insight that marketing management was needed to have a clearer understanding of the context (marketing oriented era).
Marketing evolved from inward focus (organization) to outward focus (consumer), this is exactly what the Internet evolution is going through as well and forcing businesses to adapt.
During the infancy phase of the Internet, quality content sufficed to attract visitors, now the amount of content is saturating and solely not sufficient anymore to be distinctive, persuasive and to convert visitors. Think of the many businesses offering the same books and music, the many travel websites offering much of the same and so on.
Here is where context plays and will play an increasingly important role. Depending on the context, the sites can and will be perceived different.
The content defines What is offered, whilst the context defines How / Where / When / Whom it’s offered. Without context, content is just data, in the broadest meaning of the word.
Without context, the content is poorer, less relevant and less qualitative, even if the content intrinsically is, for these reasons one site with the same content can very well work and another site with the same content just can’t.
The context basically is the determinator.
The two diarchies have a symbiotic relationship. they sustain each other, they give meaning and reinforce each other.
Websites, value propositions, e-business must be approached integrally, to create and achieve a long-term recurring relationship. Context creates understanding.
The current state of the Web (2.0) offers new technologies/enablers and at the same time are becoming basic requirements in relation to the context. Some of the oppurtunities I’m talking about are for instance personalization, collaboration and customization.
Mostly personalization and customization advance how, when, where and to whom the content is provided, all in order to reach the right customer at the right time at the right place with the right offer.
Collaboration adds both challenges and oppurtunities to the context, for reasons like co-creation, not being able to steer the process completely, social networks, end-user innovation, open innovation, but necessarily when moving into the outward focus, even more because a business has no choice, the prosumer is becoming part of it.
Is it a technology push or a market demand which is enabling all these oppurtunities?
If we examine the content and context with a top-down approach, ( see also The 3 Fundaments of Online Strategy ), online strategy is part of the marketing strategy and needs to contribute to its overall goals. With regard to the marketing strategy, the context is important to provide and retain the value proposition of products and services (content) to the target audience.
When executing the website-, internet- and social fundaments, the content and context need to be in line with the overarching levels to remain consistent, powerful, relevant and effective to achieve its goals.
Dissected per level:
*On the consumer level:
Consumers become increasingly demanding and ’spoiled’, companies won’t retain consumers if consumers don’t get what they want. Transparency creates a market space where consumers can hop without hardly any switching costs to another competitor and enjoy increasing bargaining power by consumers. Secondly, segmentation will get better and more granular. Right now, products and services are being pushed to their target audiences without any refinements. Targeted segmentation will be the next level in relevancy from this point of view.
*On the business level:
Business context is dynamic, thanks to the Internet, the oppurtunities are seemingly endless, Flickr adapted its business model from a gaming portal to a photo sharing portal due to input by its target audience and an unfulfilled need which existed amongst them. Markets become saturated and it’s a waste of energy and money to compete in Red Oceans. Products and services can be altered to suffice the new formed context (strategic planning) with the help of your customers! A double-layered meaning of outward focus.
*On the channel level:
Multichannel marketing focuses on integral cross-channel efforts making use of the distinctive advantages of each channel to reach the target audience on their terms in their way. Again, the context is important if it wants to be effective. Effective relates to being not pushy and logical from a buying process point of view.
*On the advertising level:
Online advertising. Time and money are constantly invested to create algorithms and systems to reach consumers effectively and thus as little disruptive as possible and with better relevancy. Behavioral targeting, -re-targeting and contextual advertising are examples of technologies which are being developed to provide relevant advertisements. This counts also for search engine algorithms. Bing call its engine the “decision making” engine, wanting to provide answers instead of results.
*On the website level:
Amazon does a great job in terms of personalization and to present highly effective content to customers, other kinds of technologies are focused on providing users tools to create their own interfaces with the content they want or need at that point of time.
*On the platform level:
Wordpress does well in having developed a system fully focused on bloggers, the complete interface and features are addressed to them.
Throughout the article I’ve referred more often to context than content. Quality content is a condition. As written at the beginning of the article, content and context reinforce each other, but content must have a quality threshold. Nobody wants average content. Furthermore, to have an effective symbiotic relationship between the two, consistency is key. The outcome of the relationship is quality relevance!
Ladies and gentlemen, are we ready to advance into the Internet’s marketing oriented era?
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