Drkoop

DrKoop.com is a leading healthcare network. Its mission is to allow consumers with the information they need to become active participants in the management of their own health. This company born in 1998 had quickly grown but now it had to make profit.

Indeed, DrKoop.com found venture capitalists circling around its project, seeing a profitable business. This investors provided the necessary founds to expand DrKoop.com’ popularity on the Web. Thus the company began strategic alliances: to live, a website need to generate traffic and traffic comes with advertising. However DrKoop.com had a huge “burn rate”, the found the company raised was already used in enormous partnership (i.e. American Online). Also 70 % of this website’s revenues come from advertising. The income potential soon appeared as it really was: limited while marketing expenses were limitless.

The main problem of this company is its early and fast success. The CEO didn’t though strategically, or not enough. He kept running the business blindly, without long-run objectives, in a demanding but hyper competitive market. DrKoop.com is still the leader but big competitors are coming faster than it thinks, as WebMd.com. That’s why the company as to follow a differentiation strategy to provide unique and superior value to the buyer.

Indeed, DrKoop.com has undeniable core competences it has to use for its future objectives, as the knowledge, its skills and technology (extensive library, the Drug Checker™, the Personal Insurance Center…), and of course an invaluable brand - the Dr. C. Everett Koop name, which gives it a significant head start over the competition. The only way the company in this kind of dynamic industry can sustain any competitive advantage is by emphasising the brand and the reputation. As a communication medium e-health creates opportunity to do this. Moreover the power against substitutes (such as the pharmaceutical industry websites) may come from adopting a pioneering and innovative culture, retaining the best staff, and emphasising DrKoop.com’s reputation.

The US e-health market is demanding: Americans are avid information. 43% of the internet users glance through the web to find answers to their health questions. In order to survive as a company, DrKoop.com needs a more comprehensive strategy than just repositioning health information and selling advertising. The main objective should be to hook up everyone in the healthcare market and to become a gate impossible to circumvent. The company has to build a business model that could be call sustainable and much financially successful. That’s why DrKoop.com has to review the organizational structure. It