Case Study Analysis: Widespace - Growth, Culture, and Strategy

This case study examines Widespace, a mobile advertising company founded in 2007, and its journey from its inception to its international expansion. The analysis focuses on how Widespace structured its business, fostering an innovative culture and developing appropriate entrepreneurial strategies. The company's business model involved dividing the organization into sales, publisher sales, and technology teams. The founders, Patrik Fagerlund and Henric Ehrenblad, emphasized openness, flat hierarchy, and freedom under responsibility to maintain their innovative culture. The company's strategies included educating customers, developing analytics platforms, and creating innovative advertising products. The study highlights Widespace's early-mover advantage, its ability to understand the market deeply, and its consistent innovation and creativity to dominate the advertising space. The entrepreneurial strategies and expansion were strongly based on the culture and values infused by the founders.

Running Head: Corporate Level Strategy
Corporate Level Strategy
Widespace Case

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Question 1: How did Widespace act as one of the best practice to
structure the worldwide business?
WIdespace entered the advertising arena back in the days when the IPhone was just
launched that is in the year 2007. Back in the day, mobile advertising was an absolutely
new concept and it was difficult to get the interest of the customers and clients towards
the giant platform. Widespace which was both a technology and a sales company took
the initiative to introduce the market to the giant technology, technology which would
disrupt the advertising world.
The company was able to create the best practise to structure the worldwide business
by its innovative business model .The company divided the entire organization into
three teams of Sales, publisher sales and Technology. Technology department by far
was catering to creating the ad campaigns and the creative, publisher sale was required
to build a network of potential mobile application and mobile web to sell the inventory
while the sales department was responsible for handling advertiser sales. Besides this
the company was able to translate the culture, value and beliefs of the founders into the
organization and its entire subsidiary units. Widespace created an environment which
promoted openness in communication and flat hierarchy, open door policy was the
order of day at Widespace. Freedom under responsibility and organized chaos were the
defining cultural points at Widespace. Further to it, the founders used premium pricing
strategy which was based on the differentiation strategy adopted by the company for
both the advertisers and the publishers (Latif & Soomro, 2015).
Question 2: How Widespace maintain an innovative culture and
develop appropriate entrepreneurial strategies and relationships?
Widespace entered a pre-mature market at a very early stage, which gave the company
first movers advantage. Furthermore, the founders Patrik and Henric both were from
technology background, and they were aware of the challenges they would face for not
being from the sales background. Thus, the first innovative move of the company was to

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create a culture which would be harmonious both to the sales and the technology wing
of the organization.
Widespace realised that in order to increase the business, they have to educate the
customers and make them aware of the benefits of digital advertising, hence the
company started with educating the customers. Also, Widespace wanted to improve the
landscape of the analytics to make it beneficial for the advertisers, in order to do the
same the company created plethora of analytics platform. Another aspect of creativity
and innovation displayed by Widespace was based on its ability to understand the
market in depth and create solution combining both the TV and Mobile solution for its
customers. The company with the aim of boasting its position of premium advertising
came up with several products such as Splash, Video Banner, Store locator, Calender
and the Swipe to benefit the customers and add to the innovation in the advertising
space (Phillips, Tracey & Kraatz, 2016).
Thus, it can be easily said that Widespace harbingered the change much before
everyone else in the advertising space and took initiative to dominate the field by its
consistent innovation and creativity. The entrepreneurial strategies and the expansion
strategy were strongly based on the culture and the values infused by the founders.

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References
Latif, A., & Soomro, T. R. (2015). Business Process Management Implementation: A Case
Study in Local Government. Bahria University Journal of Information &
Communication Technologies (BUJICT), 8(2).
Phillips, N., Tracey, P., & Kraatz, M. (2016). Organizational Identity in Institutional
Theory. The Oxford handbook of organizational identity, 353.