The power of platform. By Thekkepat Harish Madhavan, Director of Development, Production Management & Web Product Engineering at Epsilon

Marketing acumen in the digital age demands a dynamic approach to keeping your customers more than satisfied. As their expectations evolve, traditional marketing strategies are becoming outdated, and organisations must adapt to stay relevant. In this market, a product driven platform that meets your goals can be the key to success, says Thekkepat Harish Madhavan.

Consider the fruit seller’s problem

This analogy of a fruit seller illustrates the problem of lost opportunities. Imagine the case of Otto, a fruit trader selling oranges in the open market. Two buyers approach Otto, to negotiate and make their deals.

The first buyer offers $125 per box of oranges, but Otto refuses to sell. The second buyer offers $150 per box of oranges. Otto again refuses to sell, because he was expecting to get $200 per box. In this example, who loses? All three parties lost, since no deal was completed.

But if Otto had inquired about what each buyer needed, he could have changed the outcome. He would have learned that the first buyer needed  the orange pulp and the second buyer needed the orange peel.

With the right tools, Otto could have worked together with both buyers, to understand their expectations in detail, and then used his skillset to peel the oranges - so buyer one can get the pulp and buyer two can get the peel.

In this scenario, everybody wins: Otto meets both buyers’ needs and achieves the desired result, including his optimal price.  

Now assume that Otto is your organisation and the buyers are your clients, who each have specific demands and budgets. If your organisation offers customised products that help drive each client’s business, your clients will be happy and  your organisation will be successful.

The power of a product-driven platform gives you the tools to overcome today’s challenges by tailoring products - such as developing services build-outs, automating processes, designing custom software applications, or creating business specific lead generation systems - to meet your clients’ current and future needs, and thereby achieve positive outcomes for all stakeholders.

The power of a platform model solution

A platform is a product that serves or enables other products or services.

Platforms (in the context of digital business) exist at many levels. In simple terms, a platform is a group of programs and functions in applications that are used as a base upon which other applications, processes, or technologies are developed.

Platforms have long been popular with software developers, as they tend to solve multiple problems in a single process. With seamless design, many clients are unaware that their custom solutions are in fact part of a larger platform solution that, if used well, offers high potential for growth.

Part of this potential derives from how adaptable platforms are to new innovations, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

By integrating these types of tools, companies can leverage the power of platform to solve even more challenges, such as the ability to create personalised videos for an organisation’s employees or marketing purposes, or enhance search features.  

Platforms also provide advantageous solutions to four common business challenges that are currently impacting organisations across diverse sectors, such as marketing, information technology (IT), finance, and healthcare.

Despite their differences, businesses in these industries are all seeking to solve for problems related to rapid development, scalability, interoperability, and maintenance/updates.

In today’s fast-paced technological landscape, the array of applications that can be deployed with a platform model help organisations overcome these hurdles, innovate quickly, and stay competitive.

For example, pre-built modules and components, reusable code, integrated development environments (IDEs), automated workflows, and DevOps practices can all accelerate rapid development and reduce time-to-market.

Microservices architecture, database scalability services, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) enable platform-driven applications to ensure reliability while handling increasing data volumes and user loads.

Standardisation, API gateways and design best practices, data integration platforms, service oriented architecture (SOA), middleware, message brokers, and standards compliance/certification can address interoperability issues.

Furthermore, platform applications can minimise the user and operations disruptions associated with maintenance and updates by employing strategies such as automated dependency management, incremental updates, monitoring and alert systems, and processes for versioning and change management.

Leveraging any or all of these approaches provides an efficient pathway to better performance and reliability.

Benefits of the platform model 

The platform model offers many advantages, as compared to traditional strategies. These include:

1.        Reduced development time, which results in faster speed-to-market and cost savings

2.        Less manual testing and reduced error rates

3.        The ability to innovate and build new functionality faster

4.        Integration with any other technology

5.        Scalable solutions that adapt to changing needs

6.        Increased efficiency with reusable solutions

Figure 1: A traditional business model.

Figure 1 (above) and figure 2 (below) illustrate how the operational flow differs between traditional and platform businesses. In the traditional business (Figure 1), one consumer/business gets the products they need for their organisation from other organisations, vendors, and/or partners, or they could develop some solutions in-house.

Alternatively, the platform business process (Figure 2) serves different needs/solutions to several consumers/businesses simultaneously, with one platform solution, and allows clients to scale to other available features.

This more productive solution is achieved by building a platform that integrates common functionality with customised UI/UX design and tailored, enhanced customer experience strategies. The platform also addresses data security, and helps accelerate digital transformation with efficiencies that make it scalable to new features.

Figure 2: A platform-based business model.  

Several factors contribute to the power of a platform model:

·      Teamwork: A strong teamwork of developers, partners, and users can make a platform more valuable and powerful. The more people that are using, contributing, and supporting a platform, the more solutions, innovations, and opportunities can be found.

·      Scalability: A powerful platform should be able to scale to meet the growing demands of its users. This includes both the ability to handle large numbers of users, and the ability to accommodate a growing number of applications and services built on the platform.

·      Flexibility: A platform's power also lies in its flexibility, allowing it to adapt to the changing needs of its users and developers. This can involve supporting multiple programming languages, operating systems, and devices, as well as allowing for customisation and configuration to meet specific requirements.

·      Integration: The ability to easily integrate with other platforms, tools, and services is another important aspect of a powerful platform. This can streamline processes, improve efficiency, and enable new capabilities for users.

·      Security: A powerful platform should have robust security measures in place to protect its users and their data. This includes encryption, access controls, and regular security updates.

An organisation that employs a well-structured platform model, one that is adaptable for swift development, scalability, interoperability, and maintenance and updates, can effectively incorporate a customer's specific needs.

Designing a customised application solution that meets these requirements in a relatively short timeframe will allow an organisation to ultimately ensure customer satisfaction.

Case study: building a lead generation marketing platform

To better understand the benefits of the platform model, let us compare an application build for generating marketing leads.

 Figure 3: Traditional model for a lead marketing platform.

Figure 4: Platform model designed for a lead marketing platform.

In the traditional design (Figure 3), users are asked to visit the website, which then redirects them to a web page that is purpose-built for collecting leads. Once the user enters their information, data is saved and reported as needed.

On the platform model (Figure 4), the user, using the persistent uniform resource locator (PURL), can visit the landing page from any channel (such as email, direct mail, social, display, and organic paid search).

The platform identifies the PURL and routes the request to right landing page, serving the user with a dynamically built landing page. The landing page could cater to any program, such as an RSVP site or a response to a marketing offer, for just two of many possible examples.

Once the data is collected and saved in the database, another default build feature, which sends the leads to a CRM, can be used for getting the leads to the right destination. Analytics and reporting can also be sent the same information as that sent to the CRM, and can be used as needed.

The lead generation model is only one example of many possible platform features that can be deployed individually or in combination, depending on a customer’s specific requirements. Platforms designed with other features and capabilities will cater to different business needs.

For example, recalling our fruit seller analogy above, one platform can peel the oranges for both customers, and give them the pulp and peel respectively, in a short timeframe. 

Implementing personalisation, user experience, content marketing, social media integration, email marketing, analytics, and monitoring will attract new consumers and transactions, which in turn will improve customer engagement, increase loyalty, and generate positive reviews and referrals.

In this example, the platform model saved the company 50% in direct costs plus labor in development, and 75% cost savings plus time and effort in manual testing, by reusing automated testing scripts.

Additionally, the platform can integrate with any technology using application programming interfaces (APIs), and the IT team can reuse all the existing components and features of the platform. Finally, the platform allows the product to get to market faster, by allowing the customer to launch campaigns in less time.

Compounding these benefits, the platform enables personalised communication, timely and relevant messaging, enhanced customer segmentation, and data-driven decision making. 

An improved model for the digital age

The platform business model has revolutionized how companies operate, by creating a marketplace in which product creators and consumers can equally benefit.

Platforms can generate new revenue streams and leverage technologies that facilitate transactions, improve the customer experience, and create competitive advantages for businesses in their respective industries.

Furthermore, customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, and reporting gives the platform builders insight to consumer behaviour. The product team needs to constantly monitor and add features to the platform based on the result of their analysis of this data. New features and functions are new opportunities for existing and new clients.

For all of these reasons, the platform business model has become a necessity in the digital age. With new technologies emerging and consumer behaviour constantly evolving, companies must embrace change and adapt their strategies to stay competitive. This model offers a way for businesses to create value for their customers and generate new growth opportunities.

About the author

Thekkepat Harish Madhavan is Director of Development, Production Management & Web Product Engineering at Epsilon, where he leads high performance application architecture and design and oversees People and Project Management in West-Chicago IL, for the Irving, TX-based digital solutions company.

Among his award winning achievements and innovations in designing platform business models, Harish architected a unique, proprietary digital campaign marketing platform that integrates multiple systems to streamline process management, and has increased revenue by implementing technology initiatives, automating processes, and developing operational efficiencies.

He is recognised as a subject matter expert in every phase of the SDLC framework, including Analysis, Initiation, Development, Planning, Execution, Integration, Testing, Deployment, Monitoring, Controlling, and Closing, and has advanced expertise in developing multi-tier, web-based, portals-based, and object oriented enterprise applications.