Accounts of the Market

The marketer’s job is that of a juggler. You are tasked with exchanging value back and forth between your company and its customers, juggling supply, demand, competition and market conditions. And moving forward.

Each of the aforementioned points requires a unique skillset to handle it. Poor marketers look like they really need help. Like jugglers, we need to handle many things at once, unlike them, we do not understand how these things move, their underlying principles or their governing dynamics.

In this we are closer to Harry Potter chasing the golden snitch than we are to a juggler. The bigger problem is that we believe that our golden snitches are just regular balls governed by the well-known laws of gravity. Golden snitches of the market keep hitting from all sides, but we keep our hands raised, expecting the balls to fall gracefully at our palms.

Marketing’s current perception of market behavior and dynamics is reductive to the point of being downright harmful. Our discussions revolve around advertising and whether “scientific” descriptions of markets at a single point in time are capable of resolving every marketing challenge once and for all.

There are much more fundamental questions whose answers contribute to the marketer’s worldview much more than the ones discussed and rediscussed right now…

How do markets come to be?

Is demand met or created?

Is demand always about pain points? If not, how to make sense of different demand shapes?

Why do some markets age and die while others are reborn and amplified?

If advertising is a weak power, do we have something strong at hand to make customers pick our products and services over the competition?

And while we are at it, what causes our need to buy something?

As far as I know, answers to these questions do exist from different disciplines. They are actively critiqued, evaluated and reintroduced to reality for evaluation. What is absent is our interest, as marketers, in engaging with them. We are busy fighting for the advertising budget, we are busy watching our back.

But like anything important, you gotta make time for it. In this inquiry we will explore different accounts of the market and how it works based on studies of causality, complex systems and innovation between other things. This should allow for a holistic view of how markets behave and change over time, a view that we desperately need as marketers to be taken seriously, but most importantly to take ourselves seriously.