Lilla Hortoványi

Strategy Without Templates

Adaptation in Digital Environments

9.4 Demand Is Not Simply Observed but Also Shaped

The fourth mechanism is demand construction. In many classical theories, demand is treated as external to the firm. Firms analyze it, segment it, anticipate it, and respond to it. In digital environments, this view becomes less convincing. Demand is still real, but the form in which it appears to firms is increasingly shaped by platforms, recommendation systems, search interfaces, and default settings. This differs from the conventional marketing claim that firms can deliberately “create” or “shape” demand. Instead, what firms observe is not raw demand, but demand as filtered and constructed through a mediated interaction order.

This is a significant shift. Recommendation systems and ranking systems do not simply reveal what users already prefer. They also influence what users encounter, compare, and eventually choose. What firms observe is, therefore, not a pure market signal. It is a signal produced within a mediated interaction order.

This happens in several ways.

First, recommendation systems change choice distributions. Platforms may promote some products more than others for reasons linked to engagement, profitability, ecosystem balance, or conversion goals. Choudhary et al. (2023) show that recommendations interact with consumer search rather than merely serving it. Yuan et al. (2025) likewise show that recommendations affect how customers search. Therefore, the resulting demand pattern is already shaped by platform design.

Second, search itself is structured. Users do not search in an empty space. They search within interfaces that offer rankings, defaults, suggestions, promoted items, and comparison paths. What looks like customer preference is partly an outcome of navigational architecture. Therefore, firms must learn not only what customers seem to want, but also how the platform organizes the search process that leads to those choices.

Third, platform governance shapes supply-side behavior, which then feeds back into demand. Visibility rules affect how complementors compete, position their offerings, and adapt. When some offerings are made more visible than others, the structure of supply changes, and that in turn affects what users are likely to encounter. Alaimo and Kallinikos (2021) and Cennamo et al. (2022) both emphasize that platforms do not simply connect market sides. They actively organize the conditions under which interaction occurs.

Fourth, user-side responses do not unfold mechanically. Jiang et al. (2025) show that gig workers do not simply accept algorithmic recommendations. They interpret, ignore, adapt to, or selectively comply with them. Demand formation, therefore, emerges from interaction between platform rules and actor responses rather than from platform design alone.

This changes the object of learning. Firms are no longer learning about demand alone. They are learning about demand as shaped by infrastructure. They cannot remain purely demand-responsive in the classical sense. They must also become attentive to the systems that make options visible, comparable, and salient. That does not mean they can fully control these systems. Usually they cannot. But it does mean that strategic learning now includes the mediated conditions through which demand appears.

This is one of the chapter’s more novel claims. The argument is not simply that demand is difficult to observe. The stronger claim is that the demand signal itself is partly produced inside the infrastructure through which it is seen.

This point also prepares the next step of the argument. If firms cannot rely on demand as a direct external signal, then learning must increasingly proceed through inference, testing, and provisional adjustment rather than through stable causal understanding.

Tartalomjegyzék

Kiadó: Akadémiai Kiadó

Online megjelenés éve: 2026

ISBN: 978 963 664 204 4

Gazdaság

What happens when understanding comes only after action has already begun?

Traditional strategy rests on the assumption that organizations can understand their environment before deciding how to act. Yet the conditions that once allowed organizations to rely on benchmarking, best practices, and proven strategic templates can no longer be taken for granted. Today, organizations increasingly face situations for which no clear roadmap exists. Established assumptions become less reliable, familiar reference points lose their clarity, and strategic decisions must be made before their consequences can be fully understood.

Strategy Without Templates explores how organizations learn, adapt, and navigate environments in which uncertainty is pervasive and established templates are absent or no longer sufficient. Instead of treating strategy as a process of prediction and planning, the book explores how strategic paths take shape through action, experimentation, adjustment, and learning.

A central insight in the book is that temporary solutions are often necessary. What begins as a practical response to an immediate challenge may gradually shape future possibilities in unexpected ways. Some solutions create new opportunities and sources of advantage. Others become constraints that are difficult to overcome.

Hivatkozás: https://mersz.hu/hortovanyi-strategy-without-templates//

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