Digital consumers and the new ‘search’ practices of born digital organisations

Abstract

Consumers play an increasingly central role in born digital organisations, including driving new approaches to consumer interaction, communication, and marketing. However, we know little about how born digital organise internally to manage and respond to consumer demands. In this paper, we studied an organisation providing online travel services where its aim was to reorganise internally, in relation to consumers, through developing a set of ‘search’ practices. The role of search is particularly salient for born digitals, giving rise to new roles and expertise where organisations attempt to pre-empt user actions. Through qualitative research, we show how a born digital organisation creates new practices that we label pre-emptive, reactive, reflective and adaptive. Our main finding is that rapidly and constantly reconfiguring practices, what these new experts call ‘constructive disruption’, is essential for born digitals to manage relationships with consumers. Our paper contributes by providing a better understanding of practices within born digital organisations, and specifically the practices born digitals use to navigate unpredictable emerging changes and produce constant novelty for customers. We also contribute to the concept of search and provide examples of how it might be employed to better understand digital organising and digital transformation.