Media and Convergence Management

This chapter discusses the interrelationship between the concepts of convergence and business model. Examples of product, industry and content convergence are provided and definitions are discussed; the chapter also elaborates upon the similarities and differences between convergence and previously existing business phenomena. Further, the concept of business model is introduced and defined; the current state of business model as a field of research is presented and discussed. Finally, the chapter evaluates the fit between business models and different types of convergence.

When technologies converge, entire industry sectors are likely to do the same. In order for such transitions to succeed, not only are novel products and services needed, so too is the design of appropriate business models. In this context, it is particularly important from a firm’s perspective to critically question any affiliation to a particular industry. Instead, the business model should become the focus of innovation activities. Using a structured approach, managers can analyze their existing business model with respect to a converging industry sector early on, in order to be able to adapt it well in time to newly emerging market conditions.

The Internet has had a significant influence on value creation processes of companies. This applies not only to the electronic communication with suppliers and sales partners, but also to the Internet as a new channel to directly address consumers. While this development has led to more efficient forms of business processes, it has also had an impact on companies’ business models. This is particularly true for the media industry, in which these technology-driven changes have, on the one hand, sometimes led to declining revenues that have threatened the existence of many traditional players. Also the Internet has led to a convergence of media, since in the digital format all media types can be distributed and consumed over the Internet. Conversely, this has also enabled a long list of new ventures and business models. In addition, this development has caused changed market conditions and power proportions between certain players, which have an impact on competition as well as on potential collaborations between different firms. Overall, all of these recent changes fall into three categories that differ in the underlying drivers as well as in their potential impact. For the time being, none of these developments seems to have fully developed its potential yet, so media markets are likely to undergo further changes.

Media management is a central element of Human Resource Management (HRM) with increasing relevance. On one side, it is obvious that most HR activities have connections to media. More and more HRM activities need a communication strategy for internal and external audiences. There are many typical questions in this context: how can companies transport their employer brands? How can companies find a global language policy? Why is a company the employer of choice? How can the Employee Value Proposition (EVP) proposition be communicated to employees? On the other side, media management in general and media management research in particular have long dealt with the hot topic of media convergence, which is understood as the convergence of content, technologies, markets, and services. The interesting question is how these developments influence media management within HRM. In this article, we use the CUBE formula as a heuristic framework to discuss media management and strategy convergences in the field of HRM. Related to content, usability, branding, and emotion, the article looks at the objects manifesting in these four aspects, describes the observable convergences, and proposes strategies as to how far convergence should be sought. The article closes with media implications for research, practice, and teaching.

Increasing complexity and dynamic technologies and markets induced the phenomenon of convergence in many industries. This means that separated products, services, and technologies in former separated markets convert to new solutions and even new markets. As a consequence, convergence is a considerable topic for strategic and operative controlling as a function to support management decisions. Consequently, e.g., the business model itself, the analysis of the environments, the analysis of portfolios of products, services, and solutions are within the scope of strategic controlling as a matter of effectiveness. The profits, costs, and cash flows as well as their drivers, detailed business cases, and in depth analysis of convergent solutions are by example in the scope of operative controlling to direct management’s attention mainly to efficiency. In this chapter, we try to describe and discuss these topics both from a general view and a specific view on the business models and the control of convergent solutions.

This chapter explores a different kind of convergence—the convergence among consumer segments in the global marketplace. Growing convergence among consumer segments has increasingly enabled firms to formulate standardized marketing strategies for their brands. This has led to the great standardization versus specialization debate. For over 50 years, both academics and marketers have argued over the degree to which firms should globalize or customize their marketing programs across countries. In the following pages, we address the advantages to each approach and highlight empirical studies that have shed light on the debate. The remainder of the chapter addresses frameworks for understanding international advertising strategy and the application of cultural dimensions to international advertising research. The chapter concludes with the implications of convergence for international marketing managers.

This chapter describes how, over the past century, marketing has splintered into numerous subfields and identifies market forces that are now forcing them to re-converge. Subfields such as advertising, direct marketing, CRM, and marketing research are expanding their scope and borrowing approaches from sibling fields. We propose a process for managing across all customer touch points that incorporates key concepts and methods from the converging subfields.

Cross-media advertising, in which more than one medium platform is used to communicate related brand content, has become widespread. Several reasons for cross-media strategies can be distinguished: target group extension, complementary effects, repetition, and synergy. Media synergy—the added value of a medium as a result of the presence of another medium—is considered a possible main advantage of cross-media advertising. Four processes which may underlie cross-media synergy effects are described in this chapter: encoding variability, multiple source credibility, forward encoding, and backward retrieval. This chapter also discusses factors that influence the effects of cross-media advertising, such as fit, sequence, and the multitasking consumer.

There is little media planning data for cross-media campaigns, because audience readership research has traditionally focused on each medium separately; thus, information about the overlaps between people’s use of various media is lacking. The chapter discusses new developments in audience readership research which are important for cross-media campaigns, as well as designs for cross-media effect research.

Today’s media environment is characterized by the convergence of different media. In such a media environment, consumers perceive advertisements and interact with brands by making use of multiple online and offline channels. Enabled by technological inventions such as smartphones and tablets, brand building and managing is increasingly converging into the online domain and is characterized by multichannel campaigns. Nowadays, consumers can influence brand images by providing content about brands and products on social media sites. These consumers contradict the traditional notion of brand-to-consumer communications. Against the background of these developments, one might have the impression that the rules of brand building have radically changed. However, the target groups and their psychology remain the same. Thus, to successfully manage brands in a convergent media environment, brand managers must still follow the same psychological principles and strategies. Nevertheless, one has to take the specifics of the online domain into consideration.

Convergence and consumer behavior are closely related and impact each other. In particular, the TIME sectors, represented by companies belonging to the areas of technology, information, media, and entertainment, are affected by convergence and changes in consumer behavior. The chapter outlines the concepts of convergence and consumer behavior and selected aspects of their relationship. The effects of convergence on the consumers’ environment as well as the relationship of consumer lifestyles and convergence are analyzed. A model of technology acceptance is introduced that may help to explain the success or failure of convergence features and services. Current trends in consumer behavior are described and related to convergence. The chapter ends with a brief discussion on multifunctional mobile end devices, the merger of TV and Internet, and some effects on industry that result from the developments.

The present chapter focuses on media multitasking—a phenomenon that represents a current shift in media use behavior, following the recent trends towards technological and media convergence. In the first part we discuss the nature and scope of the phenomenon, reporting scientific findings on the prevalence and antecedents of media multitasking. In the second part we outline the implications of this shift in media use behavior for the cognitive processing of media content, relying on theoretical insights from cognitive psychology as well as existing experimental research within the field of media multitasking. Lastly, we identify potential threats and opportunities for media planning and marketing communication in view of the limited experimental data available.

The way how media companies and their research agencies have conceptualized audiences is challenged by the process of convergence. Starting with a look back to the characteristics of audience measurement the chapter proposes two approaches that can help to manage these challenges. Firstly it is argued that today’s media environments require a repertoire-oriented research perspective, which investigates how media users combine different kinds of media and different kinds of content and create their personal repertoire. Secondly, against the background of the eroding link between certain media devices and the respective user practices, the concept of communication modes is introduced; it refers to the users’ definition of what he or she is actually doing with the media. Both approaches are illustrated by recent empirical studies.

This chapter explores the position that media convergence is characterized by interplaying “technology push” and “application pull” forces in the media world. Several examples will be discussed to illustrate how research, technology development, and standardization on the one hand and rich media applications and services on the other hand relate to each other. For “technology push” aspects, past developments in digital coding (compression) and storage of audiovisual content, the importance of standardization and interoperability, and advances in wired and wireless broadband networks will be reviewed. As “application pull” aspects, more recent developments will be considered: the growing demand of users for multimedia content, the increasing diversity of devices that are used to consume media, and the quest for higher quality and novel forms of media content. As an outlook on the future, truly immersive communication as well as mixed-reality systems will be briefly addressed.

Convergence in technologies has brought about significant changes in the way we communicate, socialize, and even work. The convergence has also accelerated developments in the creation of physical smart objects that not only communicate with each other, but also communicate with humans utilizing the Internet. This creates a complex interconnectedness that has been referred to as the Internet of Things. This paper discusses those developments in terms of the media impact, and examines significant issues that are raised in the areas of privacy, security, and legal concerns.

While ubiquity has often been pointed out as one of the most important benefits in mobile marketing, its formal conceptualization has seldom been undertaken. In this chapter, the construct of ubiquity in mobile marketing is theorized and empirically examined. Ubiquity is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct that consists of immediacy, speed, portability, mobility, reachability, searchability, simultaneity, and continuity. These dimensions have been identified through a series of focus group interviews. A student sample provides the first validation of the construct. In closing, research implications are discussed while important limitations are recognized.

In this chapter we consider the concept of convergence in the context of the complex relationships unfolding between technology, socio-economic factors and the contemporary music industry—the ‘canary down the mine’ of the digital media industries. We observe that when it comes to the music industry, technology convergence trends have generally been defined in rather negative terms. In essence, they are generally represented in terms of a fundamental ‘crisis’ especially for the recorded music sub-sector. Here, we move on to critically interrogate the conventional wisdom that implies technological trends and convergences are leading to some sort of fundamental decay or decline in the power and role of the music industry. Instead, we propose that whilst the initial disruptive effects of the radical new digital technologies may have induced a certain ‘crisis’ for the prevailing models and practices of the recorded music industry, these have also prompted and been accompanied by new opportunities for restructuring and reshaping of the sector’s scope and operations.

We draw upon the concept of convergence to guide our study of a music industry that is widely perceived as a leading site for new media developments. We question the extent to which the music industry is experiencing transformations or significant disruptions resulting from technological innovations, or whether it is actually much more a case of ‘business as usual’ in the commercial music industry. Thus this chapter proposes to interrogate and challenge the dominant framing of current debates around the notion of ‘crisis’ in the music industry.

This article aims to provide a greater understanding of convergence as process as well as moment of the inhomogeneous integration of differences within the development of media. The example here is the new role of “media prosumer”. It shows how the consequence is not a simple mix of the roles “consumer” and “producer”, but again something new in the history of the development of new media as a means of production for everybody. Today’s digital network media such as Facebook, YouTube, Spotify or SoundCloud allow consumers to share, to distribute, to publish, to criticise, to collaborate or even to produce music in a way that was previously only possible for corporations or organisations. This creates a challenge for convergence strategies within related processes of convergence which are explained in the final section of the chapter.

Digitization has blurred the distinctions between producers and audiences. Thus, research on interactivity as a key element of convergent media environments has grown dramatically over the past three decades. However, despite this strong research interest there is currently no consensus about the multi-faced and hard-to-grasp concept. Obviously, interactivity is used to describe numerous processes in convergent media environments that are related to communication in general, and online communication and practices like online journalism in particular. This article highlights the main strands in the conceptual development of interactivity and explores some of the effects of interactivity by surveying newspaper websites. Looking at how newspaper websites experience the concept, we can evaluate patterns of impact on users and impacts on business value potential. Thus, the findings are linked to strategic use from a management perspective. They suggest a differentiated approach to designing the interactivity potentials of newspaper websites.

Today, the convergent network company characterizes the media industry. At the heart of the TIM (telecommunication, IT, media) industry are fast changing business networks that multiply the number and complexity of stakeholders. Relating and meeting their stakes is the basis for a professional approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Introducing basic assumptions about convergence, stakeholder management, and CSR, this chapter points to the need for a networking concept for stakeholder management by referring to a network theory of stakeholder influences and the conception of Communication Power.

The aim of this chapter is to describe the ways in which the processes of media convergence are transforming established paradigms of media regulation. These changes, far from neutral, redefine regulation processes by challenging the notions of citizen and democracy. The text is organised in three parts: first, it discusses the concept of governance and in particular media governance; then it explores several forms of convergence involved in media governance: of technology, actors, and politics, policies, and geography. The third part is a critical consideration of the cultural implications of the governance of media and explores some of the major dilemmas of colliding interests in this process.

Convergence is a ubiquitous phenomenon that cannot be imagined without as it has conquered daily and professional routines, leading to new forms of media and media usage. With changing media environments, also business demands and opportunities are constantly changing and in need for adaptation. Taking this convergent environment as a starting point, the book chapter at hand intends to examine how current as well as future trends and developments will affect business practices in general and firm’s management and staff in particular. In this context, change management provides some solutions to complex matters. Alterations in the domain of media and convergence management will concern various areas, such as technologies and organizational structures together with communication practices and will also require a rethinking of the current management profession. Not only will classical management competencies have to be expanded, but also new competencies will have to be fostered to fit the changing requirements of convergent (media) surroundings. These new skills particularly need to emerge in the realm of leadership, intercultural communication, and corporate social responsibility. Finally, both advantages and disadvantages of the new working environment will be investigated before concluding with potential ways of enabling companies’ workforce (both managers and staff) to remain up to date and competitive.