Middleman examples Offline#

There has similarly been a large-scale transformation and movement within the digital middle men that suggests they recognize a need to adapt or risk their intermediary function heading the way of the traditional offline middle men.

Middleman examples how to#

While they may not have been 'born digital', the numbers available in the digital talent ecosystem increased and the recruitment of these individuals led many brands to understand how to create direct models through the digital medium, cutting out the middle man. Over time brands have begun to realize the opportunity to develop their own direct eCommerce business. Digitally savvy brands encroaching on intermediaries' business. And so the digital intermediary thrived, enabling a transition for the traditional brand to use the new shiny digital medium while not having to adapt their indirect model.Īnd these digital-born players expand into eCommerce each day - just this week, Instagram has announced that brands can sell their products directly on the platform. ECommerce and digitization in general was not something 'natural' to their business. They had operating models and sales channels that were too difficult to change. The reason this happened was likely because traditional brands were not 'born digital'. As this article pointed out 5 years ago, it was not so much disintermediation occurring, but rather 'reintermediation'. It wasn't disintermediation though - they were just middle men operating digitally. These businesses did well by providing ease, convenience and, in many cases, lower costs afforded from the scale of the digital medium. In some cases, the old school intermediary became very diligent as a digital intermediary - Best Buy is an example of such - in other cases the digital medium even invented the middle man in the industry (think food delivery: we used to call up restaurants directly to get our delivery, there wasn't a GrubHub / Seamless style broker). They enabled us to purchase (and delivered to us) our books, investments, travel and more. The aforementioned companies - Expedia, E*Trade, Netflix, and let's not forget the biggest of them all, Amazon - still built their businesses however on the old model of being 'middle men'.

Digital middle men are still just middle men These functions have had to reinvent themselves or find themselves eroded in society as the scale of the internet has brought the likes of Expedia, E*Trade and Netflix to the masses.Ī post discussing how eCommerce removes this middle man may be a little redundant given the amount of knowledge out there - even a book from 1992 (!), Future Shop: How New Technologies Will Change The Way We Shop And What We Buy, ridiculously predicted so much of what we've seen occur in the trend towards disintermediation over the last 25 years. They had a very concrete value within society: bringing products to consumers on a core local basis and by assuming the risk of bringing those goods from afar in exchange for the premium they would charge on top of the product value. The 'middle man' was traditionally part of nearly every industry: the travel agent, the stock broker, the estate agent, the retail store, the car dealership (including everyone's favorite - the used car salesman), the media agency.