No abstract

Marketing executives operate in increasingly complex marketplaces characterized by global competition, accelerating sustainability concerns, and an increased focus on innovation. This complexity risks a fragmentation of thought more severe than that which Theodore Levitt discussed in his seminal article on marketing myopia. Indeed, we've become market myopic as a discipline and lost focus on the generalities that apply to markets and exchange more broadly. Our goal is to provide a description of the modern marketplace that allows us to re-envision this complexity as a symptom of a more general phenomenon. We do this by arguing that market complexity can (and should) be understood as a consequence of the circular relationship between exchange and shared understanding. We then show how this relationship can be expressed in simple terms using vectors to symbolize the degree to which this understanding is shared across actors and the rate at which this "shared-ness" is changing in time. The resulting model allows us to cast the variety and variability of the complex modern marketplace as a symptom of shared understanding dynamics. This, in turn, helps us move beyond the morass of contextual idiosyncrasy and toward a more parsimonious description of the market.

One of the defining features of online social networks is that users’ actions are visible to other users. In this paper, we argue that such visibility can have a detrimental effect on users’ willingness to exchange digital gifts. Gift giving is an intimate activity that comes with social risk, and the public nature of online environments can deter interactions that usually occur in smaller, more intimate settings. To study the effects of online visibility on the decision to give, we analyze a unique dataset from a large online social network that offers users the option of buying a digital gifting service. We find that purchase rates of the service increased with the number of ties that users kept on the network, but decreased with the extent to which those ties were connected to each other. We argue that the latter effect is due to the fact that, when a user's ties are connected, any gift sent between the user and one tie is visible to their mutual contacts. We explore how characteristics of users’ networks moderate the effect of online visibility, and argue that firms should take consumer network structure into account when designing digital products and promoting engagement online.

As marketers, we are confronted by an increasingly complex world—one characterized by markets that emerge and evolve at an unprecedented rate. This has led to an increased need for methods that can help researchers translate this complexity and dynamism into actionable intelligence. In the current work, I introduce one such method, and show how it can be applied to the emergence and evolution of the biotechnology industry during the 1990s and early 2000s. I conclude with a discussion of how this method can be applied more broadly to areas like content marketing, trend spotting, and the interface between qualitative and quantitative market research.