March 31, 2005
Emergence Marketing - why the name?
First of all, let me say that in my opinion marketing is much broader than what most people consider marketing to be (I guess that may be a marketer's problem in general...) In my book (figuratively speaking...I do not have any book published), marketing is not just a set of activities coming out of a specific department - it's about the way a company behaves in the marketplace. It encompasses the offerings you bring to market, how you position yourself, how you treat your customers and the rest of the ecosystem, how you (un)manage the conversations in the marketplace (I believe that my friend David Weinberger coined the concept that "markets are conversations" in the Cluetrain Manifesto which he co-authored (and to which I was an early signatory)). It is both strategy and tactics...ok, so you got the picture...that is where marketing comes from.
As for emergence...there was nothing else left so I went with that.
Not really. The reason I picked emergence is because a lot of what happens in marketing is emergent in nature. The way you come up with new product ideas is frequently emergent - the result of competitive moves, customer ideas and conversations, changes made to existing products by lead users, internal ideas and conversations, past history, etc. The ways by which technologies and products get adopted in the market are emergent in nature - the result of different experiences, multiple conversations, behaviors of all parties operating in your world, etc. And of course, everybody will agree that the way word spreads about you and your products is emergent in nature.
That is not to say that you cannot start, impact, influence, correct, dampen or amplify any of those processes – you can. What you cannot do however is "control" them. You cannot control product innovation and expect success. You cannot control adoption of your product. And of course, you cannot control the conversations about your company or your products…
So there you have it...Emergence Marketing. Hopefully a useful addition to the world of content...email me if you have any suggestions or comments!
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