Book Review - The Content Trap by Bharat Anand

A strategist's guide to digital change 

The Content Trap by Bharat Anand 

 

The Content Trap is a must read for everyone in business world. His message is simple: connections are more important than contents. This book contains golden nuggets on EVERY single page. I usually underlines parts that I want to remember. This book ended up full of black underline entirely. 
I also truly enjoyed the clarity of how he writes. As much as the concept was difficult, his style makes it super easy to follow. 

Main idea is that businesses are falling 'Content Trap' - thinking that by having the best content or product/services itself is good enough, and missing the importance of connections. He divides this connection into three parts - User connection, Product connection, and Functional connection. 

1. User connection emphasizes the importance of users being connected via the products or services. Great example is Network effects. Like phones and social networks, without other users, you wouldn't necessarily be able to use it effectively.  
2. Product connection talks about relationships between seemly unrelated products. They could be complement or substitutes. When Apple decided to sell a song at $9.99 via iTune (no margin for Apple), thier iPod products enjoyed boosted sales. In fact, free access to music created bigger music industry overall. Lowering the price boosts the entire industry demand, therefore the complement (iPod) can enjoy higher margin. 
3. Functional connection noted business should keep their strategy consistently through various decisions they make. Bench marking and best practices should be considered with grain of salt. It is dangerous to assume that strategy that worked for others will work in your organization. Economist took years to adopt online; however it was the results of their consistent strategy. It's hard thing not to follow others. Dare not to mimic. 

Here is my three key things I was able to related to my world from this book. 

1. Complement - Creative Cloud apps and stock images are complementary. I think that purchasing the complementary product (Adobe Stock or Fotolia) and trying to grow in both area is hard-kill.
2. Price Arbitrage - Creative Cloud Photography plan contains Photoshop app, and sells at a half price than Photoshop Single apps Plan. It is a price arbitrage practice. 
3. Reverse causation & Endogeneity problem - eBay's bold AB test on paid search reveals this endogeneity problem when it comes to bidding for brand keyword. In this research, eBay found that Paid searches proved to have no effect on frequent shoppers- they would have gone to the site and bought the product anyway. Its central question: Does advertising exposure lead to product purchase, or do consumer preferences results in both ad exposure and product purchase? It brings up a good point how we could truly de-couple causation and correlation.  

Lastly, HBX part made me to be more interested in their online learning platform. Esp, I liked that part where he admitted that he also fell content trap in the conception process. Also, I am so proud that I found a typo. :)  He mixed up first names and last names of  two Coursera's co-founders names! Regardless, this is a must read for anyone in any business world. I will read multiple times in the near future. It is that good!