Strategy with Flexibility

Spotify has now become a public company. The recent IPO sounded to be a success, though it’s interesting to hear all the talk around whether or not their current structure is setting them up to fail. I don’t have a stake in the ground about that, but after seeing some mission statements during a previous class, I wanted to see how theirs reflected the company. I found two mission statements that I am unsure of which is the most recent, but for my purposes I’m sticking with this one: “Give people access to all the music they want all the time - in a completely legal & accessible way.” It seems they have done so.

In an article by Forbes late last year - https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulinaguditch/2017/12/07/3-strategies-that-will-transform-your-marketing-from-spotifys-global-vp-of-growth/#1bee93aa5261 –  there were three factors cited as being the most important in their success. Coming directly from Spotify’s VP of Growth and Marketing, Mayur Gupta, they are: 

1. The customer comes first

2. Understand and adapt to customer behavior

3. Organizational alignment

Some of these are the same things we’ve seen in the readings so far, especially in looking at details of Coke and Pepsi throughout the years. Within number two, Gupta made the point that in order to adapt to customer needs, and to better understand them, a company needs to be able to try new things and be able to admit to failure if they do not work. In recent years there has a been a dialogue around the success of failure, and I think this is a good example pf how that makes sense. For a company to try a new thing, get it wrong, and then let themselves move on to new tactics and products is the ability to constantly analyze their position in the industry, along with strengths and weaknesses. Just one example of this is when Coke changed its recipe, only to revert back six months later. For companies like Spotify, this seems extremely important as they try to break new ground and be profitable.