For most of us, the definition of Market Leader is the largest company in an industry. This definition is very easy to calculate by relevant ratios. Depending on the assignment you can use different ratios like the largest turn over, most employees, the biggest profit etc. Which ratio to use is an endless discussion and when it comes to the digital world totally pointless.
We live and work in a digital world, so I would like to add a new dimension to the discussion by asking the question in a different way, how do we define being market leader in a digital world? If we observe how we use the Internet today, there is one tool that stands out from the crowd, a tool that many of us use on a daily basis, that knows a lot of our digital habits and that has a ranking system which is easy to comprehend. The tool I describe is of course the search engine Google.
The traditional definition of being a market leader is turned upside down because Google do not care about a company’s turnover or the stock quote, Google sees only one thing and that is how relevant you are in a specific area. There is an entire industry that constantly trying to understand how this relevance works, constantly analyzing it so they finally can defeat it.
Being a market leader in a digital world is very easy to determine, just type a word or phrase, hit search and you see the companies or persons who are the market leaders. I would say, and I think that many will agree with me, that if you rank first on Google and you want to be the market leader, you’ve got a pretty good start.
The problem and at the same time the amazing opportunity of this fact, is that basically anyone can become a market leader. To appear at the top of Google’s search result is many corporations big dream and ambition, very few succeed but the majority will never even come close.
There is only one first place, one winner, one leader.
Mediavision are noticing an increased awareness and tougher competition in being number one. The value of it is increasing each time a new company is reaching for the top. The valuation of being number one is extremely interesting. On global perspective it becomes so extensive that no one can fully understand it. On a local perspective where Media Vision operates with our product Minisite, being number one will have a huge importance. I can even imagine that it would become an evaluation factor in merge and acquisitions and even the stock quote. I believe that being number one will definitely have a price tag.
There is always a risk in predicting the future, who knows how to determine the market leader in the future? But if Google continues to set the agenda, there will not be long before we see this kind of headlines from the tabloids ”Panic in the tire industry, Google changes its algorithm for the third time this year.”
