Taxonomy

When we developed Acme Financials’ Value Web in the previous chapter, we identified the following constituencies:
?? Customers are at the center of the web.
?? The firm provides the offer a customer considers to purchase.
?? Competitors are vying for the same customer.
?? Service providers offer enablers that are required to conduct the transaction.
?? Suppliers have provided inputs that went into the firm’s offering.
?? Resellers/retailers provide a channel and other value-added services.
?? Complementors offer goods and services that add to the usability of the firm’s products.
?? Independent authorities include the media and governmental regulators.
?? Affinity groups consist of the customer’s family members, friends, or business associates.

The set of constituents provided a good taxonomy for us to describe Acme’s—or any other firm’s—universe and to assist with crafting the direction required to enhance the offering a firm provides to its customer segments. However, when we expand our analysis from a company to an industry level, we need to introduce a slightly different categorization format. The adjusted taxonomy we are going to apply to our analysis of the mobile technologies industry steps away from the generic constituencies identified within Acme’s universe and introduces an additional set of groupings that is unique to the industry under investigation. Whereas the constituencies we described in the previous chapter made sense from the perspective of the customer who considers purchasing an offering put forth by a firm, they no longer make sense when our field of vision opens up to encompass an entire industry. For example, it was quite obvious for the competitor constituency to have a solid presence in Acme’s Value Web because Acme’s customers would sooner or later be exposed to these companies. In other words, because we were dealing with a transactionoriented relationship between a customer and Acme—the firm providing the offering the customer is interested in—it was easy to identify those companies that offered similar products and, by definition, group them into what we called the competitor constituency.

Taken From : Enterprise Guide to Gaining Business Value from Mobile Technologies