Sustainable Competitive Advantage in Digital Media Platforms: A Bibliometric Review

Digital media platforms have experienced very rapid growth in recent years and, accordingly, have affected various aspects of business. These platforms, due to their success in competing with their traditional counterparts in the media industry, have been able to conquer the media markets’ engagement in activities and create market share. Considering that digital technologies are growing and spreading rapidly, the question is how to create a sustainable competitive advantage on these platforms. Traditional businesses may have advantages over competitors, such as lower costs, greater flexibility, and effective management, and use these advantages to succeed in the market. Businesses with a sustainable competitive advantage can create more value for customers and improve their position in the market. However, in the new global economy, digital platforms are often pervasive and developed because they enable interactions between audiences and facilitate service innovation. In addition, the nature of digital media platforms brings dynamism and audience engagement, which has provided a new organization in the context of technology. In other words, new digital approaches, such as digitalization and digital transformation, have changed the fabric of businesses, and with the possibility of new forms of economic exchanges, creating a competitive advantage has also faced fundamental changes and transformations. Although digital technologies and the ecosystem of digital platforms have provided great value to large enterprises on a global scale, it is unclear how these platforms can provide a sustainable competitive advantage. The multicategory and variety of topics in a field show the diversity of topics and the multidisciplinary nature of that research field. Digital media platforms are diverse fields covering different topics. In the past few decades, reliance on digital media platforms and sustainable competitive advantage has grown significantly, and managers' awareness of how to compete has developed. In parallel with this trend, researchers have increasingly focused on digital platforms for academic research. Therefore, creating a sustainable competitive advantage on digital media platforms is a dynamic field that includes broad subject categories. In this research, bibliographic analysis was used to understand the changes in research in this field to create a competitive advantage. The purpose of this research is to provide a general classification of studies conducted in the field of creating sustainable competitive advantage in digital media platforms and to identify and outline the scientific process of studies.
Research Methodology
The current research deals with the bibliographic analysis of research in the field of digital media platforms and creating a sustainable competitive advantage, and is a descriptive-analytical type of study. Bibliographic analysis is an interdisciplinary method that enables the mapping of research topics in the research field. The research community comprises all scientific productions in the field of digital media platforms and sustainable competitive advantage, which is indexed in the WOS. Bibliographic analysis is a common method for quantifying scientific production using statistical methods, and is considered a suitable tool for systematic analysis in various fields with the aim of evaluating the studies conducted, the trends of a specific subject, and the direction of future research. To retrieve articles related to this research, a search was conducted in the main collection section of the Web of Science database from 2000 to 2022. According to the search formula, the number of works related to the studied field was 838, which were used as reference articles for bibliographic analysis to find the best articles, researchers, and countries. In addition, cluster analysis was used to classify subjects and countries. To illustrate, checking the frequency of keywords, drawing the co-authorship network, and citation analysis of the articles, a full report including the names of the authors, title, abstract, keywords, sources, and information of each journal was taken from the WOS database using the R language and bibliometrix package and VOS Viewer software 1.6. This software is suitable for analyzing and visualizing the relationships between keywords and citations.
Findings
According to the string of search terms in the Web of Science database, 838 articles were identified between 2000 and 2022. The significant growth of the literature on sustainable competitive advantage in digital media platforms started in 2015. The highest number of articles in 2022 (80 articles) and the highest number of citations were in the strategic management journal with 12,690 citations. In addition, in the co-occurrence analysis of keywords, six clusters were obtained: competitiveness strategies, innovative and value-creating models, organizational learning, strategic management of resources, sustainable performance, and culture and leadership.
 
Discussion & Conclusion
Numerous social and cultural factors affecting media activity, the complexity of human issues, and changes in the audience's taste have increased the ambiguity in the production and supply of media products and have faced many challenges to competitiveness. Due to the lack of a comprehensive study of sustainable competitive advantage in digital media platforms, the current research seeks to identify the factors affecting the creation of sustainable competitive advantage to increase the competitive power of digital media platforms. In the current study, the scientific production of different researchers in the field of sustainable competitive advantage was investigated using digital media platforms. In addition, by drawing thematic clusters, the most frequent concepts in this field and their evolutionary processes were presented. By determining the research trends in this field, it was found that, at first, there was a purely source-oriented perspective on creating a competitive advantage; however, over time, this view changed, and the roles of innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership, and organizational learning became more colorful. Considering the importance of innovation and how innovation is formed to create a sustainable competitive advantage, the first research area for future research is how innovative strategies and business model innovation can lead to creating a sustainable competitive advantage in digital media platforms. It is also suggested that researchers develop business models that personalize the value-creation mechanism in digital platforms. Another field is related to the investigation of organizational learning-facilitating factors and the transfer of tacit knowledge to transfer experiences in line with sustainable competitive advantage, which should be considered in future research.