Strategic Choices for Media Managers: A Conceptual Framework for Strategy Adoption

Abstract

Purpose: Strategy adoption for media businesses has been a major concern for both researchers and executives due to environmental turbulence that such organizations have experienced during the last two decades. The purpose of this article is to elaborate on a comprehensive model through which media businesses could have a clear macro guideline of strategy development, based on the life cycle of their organization, as well as the contextual conditions of their environment.

Method: Combining the general framework of the Delta model for strategic positioning and three basic types of business models, we have developed a typology of media and respective strategic positioning choices - like the static side of our modeling. Then the strategy palette has been used to depict the dynamic side of strategy adoption for different types of media businesses.

Contribution: An macro-level reference framework is developed as a roadmap of strategy adoption for media businesses. This roadmap is a normative model of strategic choices from both static and dynamic perspectives. From the static viewpoint, this framework reveals the basic choices of strategy and business model for different types of media businesses; while in its dynamic viewpoint, it depicts the evolution of strategy choices over the industry life cycle. We have introduced a balance point (negative entropy) for each of the three strategic positions, which is the preferable choice for the business model in that position. But we anticipate that some firms may experience a drift from their favorable path in certain circumstances (such as technological overthrow or drastic lifestyle changes of consumers/suppliers).