Folding two medical sites into a single m3.com (2003)

Not gathering members, but refusing to gather them twice

The heart of this decision lay less in adding members than in deciding on one place to add them. So-net M3 had not only recruited doctors itself; it had bought medical information sites from WebMD and from its own parent to build scale. The trap a company grown by acquisition tends to fall into is to keep each inherited brand alive and manage members and revenue in parallel. Tanimura Itaru did the opposite: he took the signs down and fixed the place members return to as a single home page. When what you sell to drug makers is the prime real estate on that page, a fragmented front means there is no price to quote.

Narrowing the entrance, though, also means having no substitute when it clogs. By 2015 the company counted more than 80% of Japan’s doctors as members, and it went on stacking products on top of them — clinical trials, recruitment, electronic records, overseas portals — every one of which rests on the premise that doctors are coming to m3.com. How that stance works if they start getting their information somewhere else remains an open question. Whether to integrate acquired assets or run them side by side is also a question about where to concentrate the entrance to the business; the 2003 choice showed that relationship early.