Is it possible to keep working with long-term strategies?

Today businesses develop in a world that is constantly changing. This has made companies modify their modus operandi and they have shifted from long-term strategies to mid-term or short-term strategies. However many companies think they can still operate according to long-term strategies, but is this true? Is there any actor that has the possibility today to play according to the market’s old rules?

Lets start by the kind of companies that are only in the market that reinvents itself most frequently: Internet. These types of companies are called pure players.  Internet is one of the components in our environment that has most drastically changed the old rules, including how frequently should we change our strategies. Every day on the Internet we can see how new players arise, including direct or indirect competence because of the low barriers and costs to entry. These new competitors arrive with new products, services and benefits. This is the reason why pure players must be aware of new trends and change their strategies according to them. What yesterday in the physical world could happen in many years, today with Internet, we can see it occur in just days. In this way it becomes clear why pure players are not actors that can act according to the old market rules.

To continue I’ll expose the other end, which are the companies in the physical world, in other words bricks-and-mortar enterprises. This type of companies are the ones that have more trouble in understanding that the world has changed even if they don’t have an official presence on the Internet. The fact that they don’t have it doesn’t mean that the other competitors don’t have it and in case that these competitors don’t have it, doesn’t mean that the market is not asking for it. In this way it would only be a matter of time before someone takes advantage of this opportunity to satisfy the market needs. In this way bricks-and-mortar companies also have to shift form long-term strategies to short-term or mid-term in order to respond to their changing environment.

Taking into account both cases – pure players and bricks-and-mortar- the same rules apply to all the companies that are between these two ends. It is for this reason that all companies must learn that they are not the exception and that they have to play with the market new rules, which include among others working with mid-term and short-term strategies. During the last years we have seen a lot of businesses failures of companies that didn’t learn this lesson on time, that is why my advice is to learn it now before it is too late.

Image taken from Flickr.com