Brands and Complexity

Greetings from Malmo, Sweden! Finished up a couple days of meetings here with my client and fellow blogger Johnnie Moore. It was terrific to finally meet face to face after months of blog debates. In our conversations it became clear that we see the world from two quite different perspectives: Johnnie's approach is quite fluid, flexible and evolving, whereas I look for boundaries and structure. Two quite complementary viewpoints; I love it! I can tell we'll work well together.

I want to recruit Johnnie to write a post on his perspective on how brands 'form out of chaos & complexity.' as he can explain it much better than I... And synchronistically, I just received an email today from blog visitor Patrick from Australia, who says:

I have been in business, consulting and marketing for a long time, and I have come to realise a very fundamental issue, or question. I start to believe that no one really knows what works – when it comes to sales, or more specifically, branding. The world out there is just too complex to really figure out how those millions of people internally and externally will respond to which ever message you put out there.

My premise is quite radical: nothing works by design – everything emerges out of chaotic, self adaptive patterns / processes. I am living with this hypothesis for a while. I am trying to understand what the implications for marketing and management need to be if we have to admit that we don’t know the answers.

Patrick, you need to start a blog. These are terrific issues to grapple with. I think of it as the 'ecology of business,' where there's a complex system of cause and effect. I wanted to post this comment here and see what the folks here in the blogosphere have to say about it. And I'm going to start chewing on this as well! Good food for thought.