When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Take, for instance, the dilemma of today's smarter brand marketer. The prior notions about a brand being the connector of ideas from the mass marketer to the consuming masses didn't include today's scenario of an interconnected marketplace; and our aspirations couldn't see past ideas like progress equaling mass production, mass consumption of seemingly unlimited resources, and mass marketing.

In today's connection economy, the Internet, TiVo and instant messaging have likely nailed the coffin shut on the idea of a “mass-market” where consuming masses supposedly respond like Pavlov's dog to positioned brand propositions from the mass media.

The other side of it is, of course, how brands are built and capitalized upon. Human nature is a constant everyone can rely on—and the more we understand how the mind works, the more we think we have control over our market. Right?

Perhaps that's somewhat true for the time being, but isn't someone's mindset a result of concurrent circumstances? How does the marketer control that?

Interdependence

So here's the dilemma:

Just because we're at a point of recognizing the irrelevance of thinking like mass marketers, and focusing more on the human aspects of brand development, how do we still get past the hurdle of time and place relevance in a dynamic interconnected marketplace?

In our interconnected world, the more we know and can access, the more we can see the holistic and systemic nature of things and how they interrelate. This interactivity seems to be revealing where we are interdependent, and it puts the concept of marketplace-as-larger-system-at-work way beyond the concept of marketer-and-customer.

Interestingly, in nature, everything already is systemic. Our whole planet works because its simple, beautiful and elegant systems are all interconnected and dependent on each other.

By contrast, just look at our attempt at solar energy. We waste nonrenewable energy to shape limited resources into bulky panels that kind of mimic a crude form of photosynthesis—nowhere near the efficiency of a common leaf! Not to undermine my enormous respect for scientists who've even gotten us to this point… but you see the comparison. Nature just plain works better.

The reason that nature works better is that it always takes this interdependent, interrelated “all-ness” into consideration—“all-ness” referring to unlimited access to everything from knowledge, goods, services and conversations about all of the above. As we near economic all-ness with an interconnected global marketplace, perhaps nature has a lesson or two for us to learn.

The Systemic Brand

Today's brands already realize the irrelevance of one-to-many communication paradigms (like broadcasting). Smart, networked markets, however, require more than shifting media focus; they require examining the propositions that brands currently build their value on. The promise of efficient and sustainable one-to-one brand marketing points to a need for realizing where we fit and how we connect to each other in the marketplace.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ray Podder is an entrepreneur, brand strategist and designer based out of Los Angeles, California. Contact him via the GROW blog.