Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
- Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass
The Red Queen Effect is an evolutionary concept that got its name from Lewis Caroll's Through the Looking Glass. It describes a situation where a species, despite its advantages gained from adaptations, remains in the same place relative to its ecosystem.
Consider an enviornment of birds and worms where some of the birds adapted a beak that gave them an edge in catching worms. The worms that survive are the ones who adapted a better way to hide from the birds' vision. After these adaptations are passed onto the population, the end-result in the ecosystem is the same as before the adaptations.
I find this highly applicable to the lighting industry. In the highly competitive lighting landscape, any investments you make in your business might temporarily improve your market position, but soon your competitors will make the same improvements and you are back to where you started. The Red Queen Effect limits the returns of your investments, but you must keep spending or you will fall behind your competitors.
Therefore, if some of your competitors are having success with online portals, configurators, and ecommerce style experiences, you must also do the same. This is expensive and risky if you were to build it yourself for a couple of reasons.
- You may not have the same resources as your bigger competitors.
- It is a departure from your core competence as a manufacturer.
- The Red Queen Effect limits the expected returns in the long run.
What can you do?
Given that going digital is something you must do to adapt to the changing environment, one solution is to look for a low-cost provider. You might have already looked into companies like Shopify for your online needs but found that their solution was too generic. In fact, this is the case for the majority of ecommerce solutions in the market as they were designed for B2C retailers or generic B2B industries and do not fit the needs of lighting products and workflows. This is where Electrify shines.
Electrify is the solution for lighting manufacturers who want to go digital. It is a proven solution built with hard earned insights from years of building the best portal in lighting. We are taking everything we learned and creating something even better, giving lighting manufacturers an affordable option to compete digitally.
