by Ranjan Das and Kajari Mukherjee
Intense, high-velocity change is relentlessly reshaping the face of business; in every industry, markets are emerging, closing, expanding, shrinking, splitting, colliding, competing, co-opting, and growing. Standard marketing strategies do not suit these volatile conditions any more; instead a new paradigm of thinking - complexity - is increasingly being adopted to view, understand and explain happenings around us.
What are Complex Systems?
For easy understanding of this new paradigm, let us consider globalisation. It's in-the- face characteristics are the hallmark of any phenomena that can be described as "complex". Consisting of innumerable dealings and trade-offs, that could be distinctly separate or linked, globalisation has properties emerging on their own, which cannot be linked to a clear cut provenance; the system is neither well-ordered and moving towards equilibrium, nor in a state of perpetual anarchy; and there is no single central power directing the happenings.
Marketing managers can immediately sense the above description as fitting the market conditions that confronts them today. Too many participants, too many unexpected happenings, no linear correlation between strategy and result, evolution of markets in undreamt of directions, too much of disequilibrium, but still with islands of stabilities that prevent the market to tailspin down to anarchy. The managers find that development of strategic marketing decisions are beset with uncertainties arising from the volatility of the external environment; from the changing relationship between suppliers and customers; and from the internationalisation of business and trade. Thus, well thought out strategies, that follow all the tenets of established marketing management, seem not to produce expected results. Complex Issues Management (CIM) approach can help managers make sense of the vast muddle of the marketing world and give them an insight into how the marketing arena - a complex system, comprising of nested hierarchies of many similar systems - is born, co-evolves, matures and dies. CIM can also guide on ways to navigate forward by taking help of the self same complexities.
The marketer today finds that there is nothing called homoge
nous market. Peter Drucker says that the aim of any business is to create customers; similarly, the CIM approach proposes that the better one identifies the various customers groups, the more focused will be the approach. This is because autonomy characterises the constituents (customers) of a complex system. Thus, emphasis has to be on slicing the consumer base into ever-smaller groups, whose expectations can be met. The CEO of LG Electronics travels three days a week to meet customers even at remote locations, just to understand the local variations in the Indian market, such that the marketing communication and other approaches to them could be fashioned well.
The CIM Approach
To cater to the ever-changing customer tastes, CIM suggests modularity approach, such that the marketer is able to guarantee equivalent or alternative level of performance even when the various components of products are arranged differently or substituted. That is, companies that are able to go for flexible 'reconfigurability' are in a better position to cater to customer demands, than otherwise. The FMCG market can try to match the market expectations even by continuing with same product with changing packaging, like the cosmetics major Shiseido. Modular product architecture is increasingly evident in software, telecommunications, computer and automobile industries, that is, they can support high level of substitutions, as per requirements. When Dell allows the buyer to specify the configuration of his own machine out of a large number of options available, the company is catering to the modular expectations of the market.
With deeply penetrated communicational and informational reach, the customers of the market are highly interconnected. Thus, any adverse reaction to a product or service does not remain localised, and the ramifications spread instantly. Interconnections give the complex system its atypical characteristics and lead to emergent properties that cannot be decomposed back linearly. Thus, an insect in one slab of Cadbury meant that the company had to pull in Amitabh Bachhan to decry against it. With environmental and other pressure groups becoming powerful through the enhanced electronic reach, marketers have to be doubly sure that their actions do not violate any sensibilities, and if they do, howsoever small the violation may be, it can snowball into a ticking bomb, a la flapping of wings of a butterfly leading to a tornado — the most popular analogy that is used by complexity proponents. Thus, CIM approach cautions that insignificant or innocuous happenings also be noted and counteractions kept ready (rather than be caught surprised).
TO
READ FURTHER... SUBSCRIBE
TO YOUR COPY TODAY!!!
Magazines