Complexity and Marketing

Complexity is the science of systems of emergence. Systems in which the internal relationship between agents results in an unexpected behavior.

As such it is particularly useful for economic modeling, policy, weather and social phenomena.

Marketing is the practice of nudging collective human behavior, and driving change at scale (normally for a commercial gain).

Being unexpected as it is, human behavior and the receptiveness of a message, seems very susceptible to system thinking, which then makes techniques from complexity and modeling available in new ways.

As a simple example: nodes within our target audience can display emergence when talking about a product, or maybe if one of them becomes a brand advocate. At that point the funnel is changed, and will likely not follow our design.

Using modern techniques of decision science, we could not necessarily predict what would happen but we could definitely reduce ambiguity about those scenarios.

As we’re moving from designing tools and products to designing systems, could we apply the same abstractive frame to the marketing of change?