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UNIT 1
Business Analytics

Introduction, types of analytics, characteristics of analytics, business analytics, and business

intelligence; business analytics process and its relationship with decision making process;
Advantage of business analytics: informed decisions, developing distinct capability, creating
competitive advantage, key attributes of analytical competitors.
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Introduction

The word analytics has come into the foreground in last decade or so. The increase of the
internet and information technology has made analytics very relevant in the current age.
Analytics is a field which combines data, information technology, statistical analysis,
quantitative methods and computer-based models into one.

This all are combined to provide decision makers all the possible scenarios to make a well
thought and researched decision. The computer-based model ensures that decision makers are
able to see performance of decision under various scenarios.

Meaning

Business analytics (BA) is a set of disciplines and technologies for solving business problems
using data analysis, statistical models and other quantitative methods. It involves an iterative,
methodical exploration of an organization's data, with an emphasis on statistical analysis, to
drive decision-making.

At its core, business analytics involves a combination of the following:

• identifying new patterns and relationships with data mining;

• using quantitative and statistical analysis to design business models;

• conducting A/B and multi-variable testing based on findings;

• forecasting future business needs, performance, and industry trends with predictive
modelling; and

• Communicating your findings in easy-to-digest reports to colleagues, management,

and customers.

Definition

➢ Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, and practices for
continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to
gain insight and drive business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing
new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical
methods.

➢ Business Analytics is the process of transforming data into insights to improve

business decisions. Data management, data visualization, predictive modelling, data
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mining, forecasting simulation, and optimization are some of the tools used to create
insights from data.

Evolution of Business Analytics

➢ Business analytics has been existence since very long time and has evolved with
availability of newer and better technologies. It has its roots in operations research,
which was extensively used during World War II.

➢ Operations research was an analytical way to look at data to conduct military

operations. Over a period of time, this technique started getting utilized for business.
Here operation’s research evolved into management science. Again, basis for
management science remained same as operation research in data, decision making
models, etc.

➢ Analytics have been used in business since the management exercises were put into
place by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th century.
➢ Henry Ford measured the time of each component in his newly established assembly
line. But analytics began to command more attention in the late 1960s when
computers were used in decision support systems.
➢ Since then, analytics have changed and formed with the development of enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems, data warehouses, and a large number of other
software tools and processes.
In later years the business analytics have exploded with the introduction of computers. This
change has brought analytics to a whole new level and has brought about endless
possibilities. As far as analytics has come in history, and what the current field of analytics is
today, many people would never think that analytics started in the early 1900s with Mr. Ford
himself.
As the economies started developing and companies became more and more competitive,
management science evolved into business intelligence, decision support systems and into PC
software.

Types of Business Analytics

There are mainly four types of Business Analytics, each of these types are increasingly
complex. They allow us to be closer to achieving real-time and future situation insight
application. Each of these types of business analytics have been discussed below.
1. Descriptive Analytics
2. Diagnostic Analytics
3. Predictive Analytics
4. Prescriptive Analytics
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1. Descriptive Analytics
It summarizes an organisation’s existing data to understand what has happened in the past or is
happening currently. Descriptive Analytics is the simplest form of analytics as it employs
data aggregation and mining techniques. It makes data more accessible to members of
an organisation such as the investors, shareholders, marketing executives, and sales
managers.

It can help identify strengths and weaknesses and provides an insight into customer
behaviour too. This helps in forming strategies that can be developed in the area of
targeted marketing.

2. Diagnostic Analytics
This type of Analytics helps shift focus from past performance to the current events and
determine which factors are influencing trends. To uncover the root cause of events,
techniques such as data discovery, data mining and drill-down are employed. Diagnostic
analytics makes use of probabilities, and likelihoods to understand why events may occur.
Techniques such as sensitivity analysis and training algorithms are employed for
classification and regression.

3. Predictive Analytics
This type of Analytics is used to forecast the possibility of a future event with the help of
statistical models and ML techniques. It builds on the result of descriptive analytics to
devise models to extrapolate the likelihood of items. To run predictive analysis, Machine
Learning experts are employed. They can achieve a higher level of accuracy than by
business intelligence alone.
One of the most common applications is sentiment analysis. Here, existing data collected from
social media and is used to provide a comprehensive picture of an users opinion. This data
is analysed to predict their sentiment (positive, neutral or negative).

4. Prescriptive Analytics
Going a step beyond predictive analytics, it provides recommendations for the next best
action to be taken. It suggests all favourable outcomes according to a specific course of
action and also recommends the specific actions needed to deliver the most desired result. It
mainly relies on two things, a strong feedback system and a constant iterative analysis. It learns
the relation between actions and their outcomes. One common use of this type of analytics is to
create recommendation systems.
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❖ Scope of Business Analytics

Business analytics has a wide range of application and usages. It can be used for
descriptive analysis in which data is utilized to understand past and present situation. This
kind of descriptive analysis is used to asses’ current market position of the company and
effectiveness of previous business decision.

It is used for predictive analysis, which is typical used to asses’ previous business
performance.

Business analytics is also used for prescriptive analysis, which is utilized to formulate
optimization techniques for stronger business performance.

For example, business analytics is used to determine pricing of various products in a

departmental store based past and present set of information.
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❖ How business analytics works

Before any data analysis takes place, BA starts with several foundational processes:
• Determine the business goal of the analysis.
• Select an analysis methodology.
• Get business data to support the analysis, often from various systems and sources.
• Cleanse and integrate data into a single repository, such as a data warehouse or data
mart.

❖ Need/Importance of Business Analytics

▪ Business analytics is a methodology or tool to make a sound commercial decision.

Hence it impacts functioning of the whole organization. Therefore, business analytics
can help improve profitability of the business, increase market share and revenue and
provide better return to a shareholder.
▪ Facilitates better understanding of available primary and secondary data, which again
affect operational efficiency of several departments.
▪ Provides a competitive advantage to companies. In this digital age flow of
information is almost equal to all the players. It is how this information is utilized
makes the company competitive. Business analytics combines available data with
various well thought models to improve business decisions.
▪ Converts available data into valuable information. This information can be presented
in any required format, comfortable to the decision maker.

For starters, business analytics is the tool your company needs to make accurate decisions.
These decisions are likely to impact your entire organization as they help you to improve
profitability, increase market share, and provide a greater return to potential shareholders.

While some companies are unsure what to do with large amounts of data, business analytics
works to combine this data with actionable insights to improve the decisions you make as a
company

Essentially, the four main ways business analytics is important, no matter the industry, are:
▪ Improves performance by giving your business a clear picture of what is and isn’t
working
▪ Provides faster and more accurate decisions
▪ Minimizes risks as it helps a business make the right choices regarding consumer
behaviour, trends, and performance
▪ Inspires change and innovation by answering questions about the consumer.

❖ Essentials of business analytics

Business analytics has many use cases, but when it comes to commercial organizations, BA is
typically used to:
• Analyze data from a variety of sources. This could be anything from cloud
applications to marketing automation tools and CRM software.
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• Use advanced analytics and statistics to find patterns within datasets. These patterns
can help you predict trends in the future and access new insights about the consumer
and their behaviour.
• Monitor KPIs and trends as they change in real-time. This makes it easy for
businesses to not only have their data in one place but to also come to conclusions
quickly and accurately.
• Support decisions based on the most current information. With BA providing such a
vast amount of data that you can use to back up your decisions, you can be sure that you
are fully informed for not one, but several different scenarios.

❖ Data for Analytics

• Business analytics uses data from three sources for construction of the business
model. It uses business data such as annual reports, financial ratios, marketing
research, etc. It uses the database which contains various computer files and
information coming from data analysis.

Benefits of implementing BA in your organization

Apart from having applications in various arenas, following are the benefits of Business
Analytics and its impact on business –

• Accurately transferring information

• Consequent improvement in efficiency
• Help portray Future Challenges
• Make Strategic decisions
• As a perfect blend of data science and analytics
• Reduction in Costs
• Improved Decisions
• Share information with a larger audience
• Ease in Sharing information with stakeholders
❖ Challenges

Moreover, any technology is subject to its own set of problems and challenges. Following are
the challenges in implementing business analytics in an organization.

• Lack of technical skills in employees

• Fuss over acceptance of BA by staff
• Data Security and Maintenance
• Integrity of Data
• Delivering relevant information in the given time
• Inability to address complex issues
• Costs involved in implementing BA
• Investment of staff time in implementation of BA
• Lack of a proper strategy to implement BA

➢ Business analytics can be possible only on large volume of data. It is sometime

difficult obtain large volume of data and not question its integrity.

➢ Business analytics depends on sufficient volumes of high-quality data.

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➢ The difficulty in ensuring data quality is integrating and reconciling data across
different systems, and then deciding what subsets of data to make available.

➢ Previously, analytics was considered a type of after-the-fact method

of forecasting consumer behaviour by examining the number of units sold in the last
quarter or the last year. This type of data warehousing required a lot more storage
space than it did speed.

➢ Now business analytics is becoming a tool that can influence the outcome of customer
interactions. When a specific customer type is considering a purchase, an analytics-
enabled enterprise can modify the sales pitch to appeal to that consumer. This means the
storage space for all that data must react extremely fast to provide the necessary data
in real-time.

❖ Application

Business analytics has a wide range of application from customer relationship

management, financial management, and marketing, supply-chain management, human-
resource management, pricing and even in sports through team game strategies.

In healthcare, business analysis can be used to operate and manage clinical information
systems. It can transform medical data from a bewildering array of analytical methods into
useful information. Data analysis can also be used to generate contemporary reporting
systems which include the patient's latest key indicators, historical trends and reference
values.

• Decision analytics: supports human decisions with visual analytics that the user
models to reflect reasoning.
• Descriptive analytics: gains insight from historical data with reporting,
scorecards, clustering etc.
• Predictive analytics: employs predictive modelling using statistical and machine
learning techniques
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• Prescriptive analytics: recommends decisions using optimization, simulation, etc.

• Behavioural analytics
• Cohort analysis
• Competitor analysis
• Cyber analytics
• Enterprise optimization
• Financial services analytics
• Fraud analytics
• Health care analytics
• Key Performance Indicators (KPI's)
• Marketing analytics
• Pricing analytics
• Retail sales analytics
• Risk & Credit analytics
• Supply chain analytics
• Talent analytics
• Telecommunications
• Transportation analytics
• Customer Journey Analytics
• Market Basket Analysis

Business Analytics

• It aims at data and reporting.

• It is widely practiced to reckon further stats and make decisions to bring
improvements in the business.
• Here, the tasks are carried out by Data Scientists and Data Analysts.

• Mathematical, statistical, and programming skills are needed for executing business
analytics.
• The architectural domains for business analytics include data architecture, technology
architecture, and information architecture.
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➢ Business Analysis vs. Analytics: Similarities Explained

Business analysis and business analytics have some commonalities. They both:

• Examine and enhance businesses

• Determine solutions to issues
• Establish things based on the requirements

Business analysis is a practice of identifying business requirements and figuring out solutions
to specific business problems. This has a heavy overlap with the analysis of business needs to
function normally and to enhance how they function. Sometimes, the solutions include a
system’s development feature. It can also incorporate business change, process enhancement or
strategic planning, and policy improvement.

On the contrary, business analytics is all about the group of tools, techniques, and skills that
help the investigation of previous business performance. It also aids to gain insights into
future performance. In general, business analytics aims mostly at data and statistical analysis.
Categorization of Analytical Models

❖ Business Analytics Tools

Business Analytics tools help analysts to perform the tasks at hand and generate
reports which may be easy for a layman to understand. These tools can be
obtained from open source platforms, and enable business analysts to
manage their insights in a comprehensive manner. They tend to be flexible
and user-friendly. Various business analytics tools and techniques like.

• Python is very flexible and can also be used in web scripting. It is

mainly applied when there is a need for integrating the data analyzed
with a web application or the statistics is to be used in a database
production. The I Python Notebook facilitates and makes it easy to work
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with Python and data. One can share notebooks with other people
without necessarily telling them to install anything which reduces code
organizing overhead
• SAS The tool has a user-friendly GUI and can churn through terabytes
of data with ease. It comes with an extensive documentation and
tutorial base which can help early learners get started seamlessly.
• R is open source software and is completely free to use making it
easier for individual professionals or students starting out to learn.
Graphical capabilities or data visualization is the strongest forte of
R with R having access to packages like GGPlot, RGIS, Lattice, and
GGVIS among others which provide superior graphical competency.
• Tableau is the most popular and advanced data visualization tool
in the market. Story-telling and presenting data insights in a
comprehensive way has become one of the trademarks of a competent
business analyst Tableau is a great platform to develop customized
visualizations in no time, thanks to the drop and drag features.

Python, R, SAS, Excel, and Tableau have all got their unique places when it
comes to usage.

5 ways business analytics impact decision-

making
It's important to learn how business analytics impact decision-making
because it can help you make informed business decisions in the
organization's best interest. Here are five ways that business analytics
can reveal specific insights that ultimately affect the choices
organizations make:

1. Help organizations offer personalized customer experiences

Business analytics can reveal consumer trends, such as buying habits, that
affect an organization's marketing strategy. With this knowledge,
professionals can make plans according to the trends. For example, if an
organization discovers that consumers prefer early morning shopping in
their retail outlet, it might decide to open earlier. Another example is an
organization using analytical models to help ensure customer satisfaction or
evaluate its marketing campaigns' effectiveness.

Professionals can use the insights they derive from data to understand their
consumers better and implement a plan that caters specifically to them. As
these professionals continue to collect data over time, they can easily
change plans to help ensure the organization continues its success. For
example, if data analysts notice consumers aren't responding well to a
significant difference in the organization's promotion strategy, it can revert
to the previous strategy.

Read more: What Is the Consumer Decision-Making Process? (A Guide)

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2. Increase service metrics performance

Organizations can use business analytics to make decisions that increase

their metrics' performances. Metrics are the measures that supply
organizations with quantifiable information they may use to track progress
or performance. To achieve accurate results, the organization defines what
it wants to measure and the method for measuring it. For example, many
organizations decide to measure customer satisfaction by distributing
surveys and analyzing the results.

Organizations might conduct analyses of their professionals' performance,

whether management is effective, motivating factors, and how long they're
likely to work for the organization. From this analysis, organizations can plan
for their future, keeping talent that's most likely to remain with the
organization or who's contributing the most. This knowledge can help
organizations make informed decisions that significantly affect their overall
performance. For example, if an organization knows that an exceptional
professional is considering leaving, they might offer them a raise or assess
why they're considering working for a different organization.

Read more: Business Metrics (With Definitions, Examples, and Formulas)

3. Provide insight into risk management and ways to improve

general management

Organizations can use the data from business analytics to make informed
decisions about managing risks and improving general management. It's
critical for organizations to understand potential risks and make choices that
reduce the likelihood that risks occur. Business analytics provides professionals
with insight into what's likely to happen, giving organizations the time to plan
for an ideal outcome. For example, if data reveals a decline in sales each
summer, an organization might plan more competitive sales or strategize its
marketing campaign to reduce the risk of losing income.

Organizations might hire business analysts who advise whether high-risk

decisions are worth their potential outcomes or if it's best they don't proceed
with a specific decision. These analytics allow organizations to make more
accurate predictions, enabling them to manage and use their resources more
efficiently. For example, an organization might learn from its data that a
specific department requires more professionals, so they move them from
another department to compensate.

Read more: Why Risk Management Is Important (With Strategies)

4. Simplify accounting processes

Business analytics can help accounting professionals make informed decisions

about budgeting and investments. It's crucial that an organization supports all
decisions about financial assets with logic and statistical data that guarantees
the organization doesn't suffer any significant losses. Insights from business
analytics reveal more in-depth information about an organization's financial
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performance and help professionals decide how to manage assets. For

example, data might show that an organization uses too much of its profit on
various expenses, such as electricity bills and overtime. These revelations allow
professionals to make decisions about minimizing unnecessary costs and
saving the organization money in the future.

Read more: Accounting and Finance Management: Definition and Difference

5. Enhance the supply chain

Professionals can use the data from business analytics to discover inefficiencies
in an organization's supply chain systems. An organization's supply chain is its
order of processes to produce and distribute its products or services.
Discovering more information about the effectiveness of a supply chain can
reveal areas that an organization might work to improve. For example,
professionals might notice from the data that certain deliveries are consistently
behind schedule. These professionals can then analyze the cause of the delay
and find a solution or an alternative, ultimately leading to a more efficient
supply chain.

Main components of business analytics

Here are the main components of business analytics that you might use to
analyze data to help make decision-making easier:

• Association and sequence identification: This process involves

identifying predictable actions that professionals perform with other
actions or in a specific sequence.
• Data aggregation: This is the process of collecting, organizing, and
filtering data through transactional records or volunteered data.
• Data mining: Data mining in business analytics involves sorting
through large sets of data using statistics, databases, and machine
learning to identify trends and establish relationships.
• Data visualization: This is the visual form that professionals present
data in, such as graphs and charts. They aim to create these
visualization tools in a way that's easy for most professionals to read
and understand.
• Forecasting: This is the process of analyzing historical data to estimate
future trends or events.
• Text mining: Involves searching and organizing large sets of data in
the form of text to perform qualitative and quantitative analysis.
• Optimization: After professionals identify trends and make predictions,
organizations use simulation techniques to see if the desired outcomes
are likely to occur.

Which roles use business analytics?

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Business analysts are the primary users of business analytics. These

professionals develop documentation and system plans that help improve
organizations' efficiency. They identify and analyze various business processes
to make informed recommendations about business practices. Business
analysts examine ways organizations can reduce costs and save money. They
also simplify complex information so professionals in the organization can
understand specific data. Some business analytics programs offer training to
professionals about using systems effectively. Some specific job roles that
business analysts have include:

• Business analyst
• Business process analyst
• Business system analyst
• Data analyst
• Functional architect
• IT business analyst
• System analyst
• Usability or UX analyst

 

Benefits of implementing BA in your organization

Apart from having applications in various arenas, following are the benefits
of Business Analytics and its impact on business –

• Accurately transferring information

• Consequent improvement in efficiency
• Help portray Future Challenges
• Make Strategic decisions
• As a perfect blend of data science and analytics
• Reduction in Costs
• Improved Decisions
• Share information with a larger audience
• Ease in Sharing information with stakeholders

An Introduction to Informed Decision-Making

Informative business decisions don’t arise solely from intuitive

assumptions – rather, they require data, insights and an in-
depth knowledge of a situation to create informed choices.
Businesses use analytics as tools for making the appropriate
choices when making informed business decisions.

Benefits of Informed Decision-Making

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Businesses rely on decisions driven by data and insights to

reduce costly errors while simultaneously increasing efficiency
by reallocating resources more effectively.

Once this occurs, your planning becomes much more precise

and aligns more with market realities, enabling your firm to
rapidly respond and adapt in response to shifting customer
requirements – giving it an advantage that helps it overcome
obstacles quickly and confront challenges head-on.

Strategies for Informed Decision-Making

Now that you understand the significance of making informed

decisions for your business, how can this strategy be put in
practice? Here are a few key strategies:

Data Collection

An integral step toward making informed decisions should

always include collecting relevant data – this may involve
conducting market research, customer satisfaction surveys and
financial metrics among others. A thorough dataset serves as
the cornerstone for effective decision-making processes.

Thorough Analysis

Accurate analyses require careful scrutiny. Examining data

carefully will reveal patterns, trends and insights which could
potentially shape future decision making processes. Unknown
opportunities often hide within details; by conducting in-depth
analyses we uncover hidden gems.

Seek Expertise

Never be intimidated into seeking guidance from experts

within your industry when necessary; their insights could prove
invaluable in understanding complex data sets.

Scenario Planning
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Utilising various scenarios and their outcomes helps prepare

you for unexpected circumstances that might shift quickly,
providing flexibility should things shift unexpectedly. Doing this
also builds resilience against possible outcomes by permitting
swift adjustments if circumstances require quick fixes.

Empower Decision-Making with Technology

Technology plays an integral part in helping businesses make

informed decisions by serving as both an enabler and catalyst of
data-driven strategies. A well-conceived data strategy guides
businesses’ efforts to make use of all information available and
equips them to use that knowledge efficiently.

Technological tools play a central role in data-driven decision-

making; however, an overarching data strategy provides its
primary motivation. When effectively integrated into business
operations, technological tools enhance decision-making
abilities while strengthening competitive edge.

Overcoming Challenges

Businesses embarking on the path toward informed decision-

making can face several key hurdles on their way: data quality is
of primary concern when maintaining accurate and up-to-date
sources; information overload requires taking an opportunistic
approach by prioritising relevance over volume in selecting data
or insights;

Reluctance to change can also pose as an impediment on the

journey toward data-driven decision-making. So, an effective
change management process must be put in place in order to
create an environment in which team members readily accept
data as an asset rather than a burden.

The Future of Informed Decision-Making

As technology evolves, data and information play an ever-

increasing role in decision-making processes. Machine learning
and artificial intelligence will take on an even larger role in
providing real-time insight and predictions to decision-makers.
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Conclusion

At its heart, informed business decisions are undeniably

powerful. Making good use of data requires not simply
collecting it – but rather knowing how best to apply it effectively
for competitive advantage in today’s fast-changing business
world.

Put data-driven strategies, technology solutions and informed

decisions at the core of your success if you wish to secure that
competitive edge that awaits.

Competitor Analysis - Meaning, Objectives and Significance

Organizations must operate within a competitive industry environment. They do
not exist in vacuum.

Analyzing organization’s competitors helps an organization to discover its

weaknesses, to identify opportunities for and threats to the organization from
the industrial environment.

While formulating an organization’s strategy, managers must consider the

strategies of organization’s competitors.

Competitor analysis is a driver of an organization’s strategy and effects on

how firms act or react in their sectors.

The organization does a competitor analysis to measure/assess its standing

amongst the competitors.

Competitor analysis begins with identifying present as well as potential

competitors. It portrays an essential appendage to conduct an industry
analysis.
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An industry analysis gives information regarding probable sources of

competition (including all the possible strategic actions and reactions and effects
on profitability for all the organizations competing in the industry). However, a
well-thought competitor analysis permits an organization to concentrate on
those organizations with which it will be in direct competition, and it is
especially important when an organization faces a few potential competitors.

Michael Porter in Porter’s Five Forces Model has assumed that the competitive
environment within an industry depends on five forces:

1. Threat of new potential entrants,

2. Threat of substitute product/services,
3. bargaining power of suppliers,
4. bargaining power of buyers,
5. Rivalry among current competitors.

These five forces should be used as a conceptual background for identifying an

organization’s competitive strengths and weaknesses and threats to and
opportunities for the organization from it’s competitive environment.

The main objectives of doing competitor analysis can be summarized as

follows:

▪ To study the market;

▪ To predict and forecast organization’s demand and supply;
▪ To formulate strategy;
▪ To increase the market share;
▪ To study the market trend and pattern;
▪ To develop strategy for organizational growth;
▪ When the organization is planning for the diversification and expansion
plan;
▪ To study forthcoming trends in the industry;
▪ Understanding the current strategy strengths and weaknesses of a
competitor can suggest opportunities and threats that will merit a
response;
▪ Insight into future competitor strategies may help in predicting upcoming
threats and opportunities.

Competitors should be analyzed along various dimensions such as their size,

growth and profitability, reputation, objectives, culture, cost structure, strengths
and weaknesses, business strategies, exit barriers, etc.

hat is Competitive Advantage?

It is a truism that strategic management is all about gaining and maintaining

competitive advantage. The term can be defined to mean “anything that a
firm does especially well when compared with rival firms”. Note the
emphasis on comparison with rival firms as competitive advantage is all
about how best to best the rivals and stay competitive in the market.

Competitive advantage accrues to a firm when it does something that

the rivals cannot do or owns something that the rival firms desire. For
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instance, for some firms, competitive advantage in these recessionary times

can mean a hoard of cash where it can buy out struggling firms and increase
its strategic position. In other cases, competitive advantage can mean that a
firm has lesser-fixed assets when compared to rival firms, which is again a
plus in an economic downturn.

What is Sustained Competitive Advantage?

We have defined what competitive advantage is as it relates to strategic

management and the sources of competitive advantage differing from firm
to firm. However, a firm can have a source of competitive advantage for only
a certain period because the rival firms imitate and copy the successful
firms’ strategies leading to the original firm losing its source of competitive
advantage over the longer term. Hence, it is imperative for firms to
develop and nurture sustained competitive advantage.

This can be done by:

▪ Continually adapting to the changing external business landscape and

matching internal strengths and capabilities by channeling resources
and competencies in a fluid manner.
▪ By formulating, implementing, and evaluating strategies in an
effective manner which make use of the factors described above.

The fact that firms lose their sources of competitive advantage over the
longer term is borne out by statistics that show that the top three broadcast
networks in the United States had over 90 percent market share in 1978
which has now come down to less than 50 percent.

The Advent of the Internet and Competitive Advantage

With the advent of the internet, competitive advantage and the gaining of it
has become easier as firms directly sell to the consumers and interlink the
suppliers, customers, creditors, and other stakeholders into its value chain.
Because of the removal of intermediaries, firms can reduce costs and
improve profitability.

Essentially, the internet has changed the rules of the game and hence
sources of competitive advantage in this digital era are now about how well
firms utilize the digital platform and social media to gain advantage over
their rivals.