ecosystems

Modern marketing really began in the 1960’s with Philip Kotler and his ideas about uncovering the “needs, wants and interests of target markets.” Ever since, generations of marketers have learned to focus on the consumer and communicating features and benefits to them effectively.

Steve Jobs didn’t want to build an app store. As Walter Isaacson describes in his biography of Apple’s founder, the famously controlling Jobs was wary of the “bandwidth” needed to police a veritable army of third party developers. At first, he wouldn’t even discuss it.

In his novel The Castle, Franz Kafka tells the story of a man named “K” who is summoned by mysterious authorities for unknown reasons. He finds himself at the mercy of their bureaucracy and endless paperwork, which is carried out for a purpose that nobody can fathom but everyone seems to accept.

In 1892, George Eastman formed the Eastman Kodak Company to “make the camera as convenient as a pencil.” The idea took off and by the early 20th century, Kodak had become one of America’s largest companies and Eastman one of its most successful entrepreneurs.

When Henry Ford started his company in 1903, he did more than just create a car or an assembly line (neither of which he actually invented). What he did was establish an entirely new form of organization, culminating in the vertically integrated River Rouge complex that was completed in 1928.

From Web And Desktop To Anytime, Anywhere.

In the early stages of digital, businesses first dipped their toe on the Web by launching brochure like Websites which had to be located initially through a browser "URL" (WWW) followed quickly by search engines which organized the Web. Today, the Web and the digital landscape looks dramatically different compared to the Internet's frontier years. For starters, the Web has become mobile, with 1.2 billion of the world's population accessing the Web through a mobile browser.

I have a chronic habit of reaching more for biological metaphors to help describe how we inhabit a world of abundant technology and media. Two decades ago, when I was working on large IT systems in the civil service, Ian Franklin and I suggested a shift from thinking about these systems as engineering interventions to a more organic, gardening-style approach.

From Business Insider:

"Here’s the thing about many social media agencies: they often find themselves in the position of having to polish a turd. You pay them to get the word out about something, but you might not have an actual thing (a “social object” if you will) to talk about. The internet likes to talk about things - cool things, new things, awesome things, shiny things, fun things. Social media agencies don’t make things. They talk about things"

It is commonly known that Apple does not use user-centered research to help the Business determine what they should create or do next. They go one better. They build “playing fields” wide enough for people to do as they please.