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Brands in Networks:an e-book by Antony Mayfield from iCrossingupdated 08.09.08
The physicists and mathematicians were shocked by the models that theeconomists were using to develop their ideas.
“...to their eyes, economics was a throwback to another era. One of theparticipants at the meeting later commented that looking at economicsreminded him of his recent trip to Cuba. As he described it, in Cuba, youenter a place that has been almost completely shut off from the Westernworld for over forty years by the US trade embargo. The streets are full ofPackard and DeSoto automobiles from the 1950s and relatively few carsof more recent vintage. He noted that one had to admire the ingenuity ofthe Cubans for keeping these cars running for so long on salvaged partsand the odd piece of Soviet tractor. For the physicists, much of whatthey saw in economics had been locked in its own intellectual embargo,out of touch with several decades of scientific progress, but meanwhileingeniously bending, stretching, and updating its theories to keep themrunning.”
Economists had been stuck in ways of thinking that glossed over the truecomplexity of the world. They treated everyone as a rational player, andmarketplaces as complex but explainable and predictable mechanisms that couldbe managed.It is early days for media and communications on the web – we are only a coupleof decades in, give or take. If a native digital strategy is to emerge, as opposedto imported values, models and thinking from the age of channel media, weneed to embrace the complexity. That means reaching out for new analogies,for the experiences and models of people – ecologists, financial traders, leanmanufacturers – who have succeeded in developing models that make sense of complexity and allow them to develop successful strategies.Complexity is daunting because we are used to squeezing reality into stable,understandable models. Even with a market segmentation that breaks down“consumers” into hundreds of groups, we’re still oversimplifying the case. Weusually end up making advertising and other planning decisions modelled onreaching people via single websites with high traffic. We ignore the reality thatpeople don’t fire up their web browsers and spend their time on MSN or theGuardian accessing content and absorbing the advertising and PR messages theyfind there.Search engines and social media have set our attention free, allowing us to moveswiftly through a network of experiences and information that add up to the mediawe want. Consumers and audiences aren’t appropriate terms here. They are us. And we’re all – brands, media, governments and private citizens – players in thegreat networks of the web.
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