Business and Marketing Dissertation

Alongside my UX Design course, I am also completing a Joint Hons. Business and Marketing BA with the University of Essex. An Advanced Business Project forms our final module and dissertation, and I have chosen to evaluate traditional and UX marketing within Platform Businesses as my topic.

Platform businesses are of particular interest to me as they have broken the previously existing linear top-down and bottom-up business structures causing 'disruption' to both new, emerging, and pre-existing markets which makes their potential incredibly exciting. Not only this, but a significant share of Unicorn businesses have adopted platform business structures making them extremely valuable to the global market.

The research has explored the evolving trends within platforms who increasingly are focussing less on traditional 'push' marketing, and focussing on creating experiences and communities through optimised UX marketing and 'pull' strategies.

I have been analysing 5 Platform businesses in particular within this project, Amazon, AirBnB, Youtube, Uber, and Fiverr. Without wishing to bore you on how interesting the literary review and findings have been, it has been fascinating to see the external factors which play critical roles to marketing and stakeholder decisions and largely due to the newness of platform businesses one common threat trend is the increased likelihood of governance, especially in shared-economy environments.

Governance is a theme which can already be seen impacting platforms, such as YouTube where content is monitored and removed when inappropriate. - Of course, governance is not always a bad thing, and with interconnectivity and internet usage continuing to grow it is imperative that user safety is considered, adapted, and implemented as required. However, it demonstrates the challenges businesses face when analysis their risk within a market, Platforms may appear an attractive business model for the 'hands-off' founders and CEOs, except that governance demonstrates how easy falling victim to your own success can be if a hands-off approach is taken!

Although this final business project has not always been easy to balance alongside work and life, I have loved the opportunity to deep-dive in to an area of business and marketing that I have genuine passion for and will share the final article in due course.

I have read many great resources throughout the process, but can thoroughly recommend the following for anyone interested to learn more about digital marketing trends and platform businesses:

1. The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power. By, Malherbe M, Simon F, Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer and David B. Yoffie

2. Global UX : design and research in a connected world. By, Whitney Quesenbery, Daniel Szuc