Marketing, for many people, brings to mind a number of volume operations marketing concepts like promoting, pricing, branding,

search engine optimization, and the like. But for complex systems enterprises, the term is less clearly suggestive seminars, speeches, articles, white papers all of which, taken as a whole, seem dangerously low key. In actual fact, however, there is a very clear progression in marketing capabilities, specifically tailored to the complex systems enterprise, that is geared toward garnering increasingly powerful positions in any given target market . The four steps are: 1. Trusted Advisor 2. Domain Expert 3. Thought Leader 4. Relationship Broker Executives in complex systems organizations can and should use this model to benchmark their current efforts and set targets for next-generation improvements. 1. Trusted Advisor. The first position of power occurs at the individual account level. The benchmark is to step out of the nameless category of supplier and also get beyond the more respectful but equally arms-length category of vendor to reach the rare and exceptionally valuable status of trusted advisor or partner. This is a personal accomplishment of the account executive who has developed a relationship of trust with a critical executive in the target account. The advisor responsibility of this relationship is to treat the customer as a client, meaning you give them the best advice for their own sake, regardless of its impact on you, your company, or any pending transaction. At the other end, the client-customer consults with you prior to consulting with other vendors or suppliers to discuss strategic issues while they are still open to alternative approaches. Advisor relationships are not easily transferred from one person to another they are genuinely personal. As a result, they do not scale 2. Domain Expert. The first scalable form of marketing power is domain expertise for a particular market segment. Segment, in this context, refers to a community of buyers who share a unique set of common problems and who reference each other during their purchase decision making. Collectively they are looking for a community-trusted advisor, someone really knowledgeable about their problems, someone they can all rally around as the safe buy for their solutions. Pragmatic customers in this context choose to go with the herd which, in effect, means they act like a unified segment. In this context complex systems marketing is all about Identifying the herd, its members, and the boundary limits of the segment,

Understanding the most compelling problems shared by segment members, and Orchestrating a complete solution what we call a whole product to fully address this shared problem set. . This solution is sold to early-adopting members of the herd with a focus on achieving full customer satisfaction as soon as possible. Once that satisfaction is in place, then the word-of-mouth referencing network within the segment begins to actively engage in promoting the solution. When that activity reaches a tipping point, the word goes out that this solution is the solution, and the segment rallies around its chosen vendor, making it very difficult for competitors to engage. Segment share battles are won with tight focus, deep domain expertise, and an unswerving commitment to solve the real problems in their entirety. Inevitably this involves working with partners and allies, which is why we call it orchestrating the whole product. 3. Thought Leader. This is a purely horizontal power position and as such is highly scalable, once it is achieved. The corollary here is that it is hard to achieve. Typically, success comes from leveraging a disruption in the technology space your company is expert in, allowing you to showcase to the rest of the world what is coming their way. This early wake-up call allows them in turn to modify their strategy and execution to take advantage of the new benefits and guard against the new dangers. To give an example. Salesforce.com has done a masterful job with this in relation to enterprise software as a service. Thought leaders provide cross-industry frameworks that project a redistribution of power across segments and roles within segments. That is, when tectonic shifts happen, they destabilize everything that has been built upon the prior market model, and everyone in the market needs a new game plan of some sort. Thought leaders have permission to indeed, are encouraged to propose new architectures for the future market. It is understood that these architectures will privilege the products and services the thought leader is bringing to market. People are willing to grant that reward because they appreciate how great the risk is, not just to themselves but to the thought leader as well. 4. Relationship Broker. Relationship brokerage is all about creating opportunity access for others. The more power a company has, the more visibility it has into these opportunities, the more chance it has to open doors for others. This is the power that McKinsey has when it is time for strategy to be transitioned to projects, and the power that Accenture has when it is time for projects to transition to purchases. It is the power that the handful of aerospace and defense contractors have with respect to military procurements. It is the

power a platform vendor has with respect to complementary offers from other vendors: it can ignore, certify, endorse, or even ban such offers. It is the power that investment bankers hold close to their chests when it comes to the buying or selling of companies. It is the power that J.P. Morgan Chase exercised at the beginning of the last century and at the beginning of this one to help rescue financial markets in a tailspin. It is the power that Nationalized Oil Companies dangle in front of global energy enterprises that can often lead to corrupt business practices. As you can see, relationship brokerage, like nuclear power, can be used for good or ill. Before we look into that, however, it is important to recognize that this is the greatest power a complex systems enterprise can hold. Basically, relationship brokers are making markets, both for themselves and for the companies they are interconnecting. These relationships imply greater co-investment, greater information sharing, greater loyalty than normal business partnerships. At their most formal, they are the keiretsu of Japan and the chaebols of Korea, although for present times these structures need to be made less formal. At their least formal they are meetings of the World Economic Forum at Davos, or the technology industry at TED.