Blue Spoon Releases White Paper on Marketing Ecosystem Design; A New Framework for Competitive Strategy.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Blue Spoon Consulting Group, LLC, announced today the release of its white paper, Marketing Ecosystem Management. Marketing ecosystems shift the view of 'brand' as the primary unit for strategy-making to a view of business ecosystems as a center-of-gravity for creative strategy. The white paper argues that advantage goes to those marketers who do the better job of designing ecosystems with mutually-reinforcing effects from internal and external assets, and managing the ecosystems for continual growth and improvement.

"New marketing technologies, no matter how sophisticated, are not sufficient by themselves to deal with new dynamics of competition and complexity," said John G. Singer, principal, Blue Spoon Consulting. "Unless these new technologies can be translated into transformative thinking about marketing, including totally new forms of strategy and management, using them to sharpen the tools of worn-out paradigms is recipe for failure."

This is the second strategy paper from Blue Spoon introducing next-generation marketing concepts. Last month, the firm published its breakthrough vision of systems marketing, describing a new arena for competition at the system-level. That paper detailed the fielding and evolution of 'adaptive tactical systems' as a management innovation to harvest top-line sales for pharmaceutical brands in the U.S.(1) This second strategy paper provides context for "marketing" to navigate the currents shaping major directional change in the world. It centers on the interplay of two revolutions: a network revolution, where the operating environment for business is increasingly outside the control of any one organization; and globalization, a massive reorganization of the global economic landscape into a single international system marked by the dissolution of boundaries and the free flow of people, investment, goods, and ideas.

Addressing the implications of customer and competitor domains which have become linked into hugely complex webs of interaction, the paper suggests marketers can no longer fruitfully distinguish between actors and their environments, let alone say much about any piece in isolation. It contends that since all players in all industries have access to virtually the same data and information technology, everyone can equally target their promotion at a subatomic level. This challenges assumptions about the competitive value of personalized advertising, regardless of how deep it can reach to personalize. The paper also defines strategic choices between customer-centric and network-centric models in dimensions of concept-driven innovation, business collaboration, media aggregation, and dealing with information glut.

Systems marketing is rooted in general systems theory. Pioneered in the 1940s and evolved over time into the new science of complexity, general systems theory focuses on interrelationships rather than things, identifying patterns of change instead of static snapshots taken at a particular moment in time, and on the behavior of connected wholes rather than independent parts. To receive a copy of the new strategy paper, send an e-mail with contact details and delivery preference, to: [e-mail]. White papers on systems marketing and marketing ecosystem management are also available for download directly from the Blue Spoon Consulting website.

Blue Spoon is a marketing architecture consultancy to the human health industry. Systems marketing is a new framework for competitive strategy developed by Blue Spoon to solve systemic business challenges, and to drive collaborative innovation at the industry, business unit, and individual product levels. Blue Spoon is the next generation that happens in every industry: we've outdated the old ways of thinking about things to help clients improve marketing performance, shape new management principles, and manage complexity. For more information: www.bluespoonconsulting.com.

(1) Singer J. 2005. Systems Marketing: A New Operating Model for Pharmaceutical Marketing. Journal of Consumer Behaviour; (4) 6:480-495 DOI:10.1002/cb26