Journal of Business Strategy Publishes Paper on Marketing Ecosystems A New Framework for Competitive Strategy
Tuesday, 12 September 2006
Blue Spoon Consulting Group, LLC, announced today the Journal of Business Strategy has published its paper on marketing ecosystems.[1] Marketing ecosystems are an advanced form of creative and competitive strategy. They abandon the zero-sum game of competing based on functional attributes or best practice, emphasizing instead strategic differentiation and tactical advantage at a system level.
“Marketing ecosystems provide an organizing paradigm to strategically position a network of business activities and draw innovative power from their connectivity,” said John G. Singer, principal, Blue Spoon Consulting. “The rampant commoditization and disorder engulfing nearly all industries suggest old diagnoses have been wrong and old remedies ineffective in meeting the challenges of new growth. The key to outperforming rivals resides in ideas that dissolve traditional industry boundaries and in using frameworks to lead broad system change.”
Marketing ecosystems are a conceptual gateway to new structures in marketing. These structures introduce new ideas of order and measure in which the logic of “brand” plays a secondary role. The central premise of the paper is that the marketing industry – the way its output is defined, created, sold, purchased, and measured – is a system out of sync with the dynamics of complexity and consumer behavior. Its traditional lens has become clouded by conceptual lock-in to an outdated image of the power of brands. While advances in information technology are opening new spaces within which organizations can operate, “marketing” is evolving only in close proximity to the status quo. Competitive advantage now lies in a ‘connectivity space’ between industries, and in linking messages that have never been linked before. Using biological ecosystems as an analogy for modern business environments, the paper helps companies move from deploying individual pieces and analyzing them autonomously, toward designing integrated wholes that influence a system of behavior with mutually-reinforcing effects. Creativity is expressed in terms of new wholes, new contexts for business, and new dimensions of performance by tightening the fit between marketing communications and information technologies, and combining them into unique capability packages, in which each component enables and shapes the other. Structure forms strategy. The whole organizes the parts.
System-level competition operates at the product, market, industry, society, and global economic levels. The paper includes a roadmap to adequately consider the interconnected nature of the actors and challenges involved in designing business ecosystems, implementing their marketspace engagement, and managing their evolution. An ecological approach to information strategy is also introduced, enabling constructive interdependence across industry boundaries. It is this shared awareness and shared understanding of business dynamics that generates amplified power and innovative responses to fluid business conditions.
This is the second paper from Blue Spoon on business ecosystem strategy. At the beginning of 2006, the firm introduced the concept of ‘adaptive tactical systems’ in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour.[2] Adaptive tactical systems are a coordinating mechanism to develop and exploit synergies between multiple content flows and multiple sources of business software; these interlinked relationships result in marketplace effects greater than those that can be achieved piecemeal. Adaptive tactical systems are designed to yield near-term performance impact. Published by Emerald Group Publishing, Ltd., the Journal of Business Strategy is an international peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the practical aspect of new business theories and implications for real-life business situations. To receive a copy of either paper, send an e-mail with contact details and delivery preference, to: mail@bluespoonconsulting.com. Blue Spoon’s view of system-level competition will also be published in the upcoming fall issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
[1] Singer J. 2006. Framing Brand Management for Marketing Ecosystems. Journal of Business Strategy, (27) 5:50-57 DOI:10.1108
[2] Singer J. 2005. Systems Marketing: A New Operating Model for Pharmaceutical Marketing. Journal of Consumer Behaviour; (4) 6:480-495 DOI:10.1002/cb26