The Next Normal for Marketing — The Dynamics of a Pandemic, Provisioning Systems, and the Changing Patterns of Daily Life. Issue 1 (February 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Layton, Roger A.; Domegan, Christine
• Is Part Of: Australasian marketing journal. Volume 29:Issue 1(2021)
• Page Start: 4
• Page End: 14
• Publication Date: 2021-02
• Subjects: provisioning systems -- marketing systems -- multi-level social systems -- evolutionary dynamics -- local environments -- balancing structure and diversity -- stakeholders -- small groups -- self-organization; Marketing -- Australasia -- Periodicals; Marketing -- Periodicals; 658.8480905
• DOI: 10.1177/1839334921998514
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1441-3582

Abstract

Pandemics, climate warming, growing inequality, and much more bring crises that change the patterns of daily life in human communities, directly impacting the provisioning systems that form in a community to meet the needs and wants of individuals, groups, and entities for goods, services, experiences, ideas. Provisioning systems sometimes begin as leadership initiated top-down, authoritarian prescriptive supply networks, public and private. Sometimes, they originate as bottom-up, self-organized, innovative, open choice, often informal, exchange based networks, and mostly, over time, they emerge as untidy self-organized multi-level diverse assemblages of both. The diversity of provisioning systems in a community enables crisis resilience, but limits efficiency and control. The provisioning systems that form in these ways are complex, multi-level, non-linear evolutionary systems, often unpredictable, and lacking direction. Balancing a desire for stability and an appetite for diversity, innovation, and change in shaping a provisioning system is like walking a narrow corridor on the edge of chaos. Achieving balance, avoiding slipping into chaos, rests on the management of a set of complex social mechanisms. These embrace delivery mechanisms where value is produced and consumed through complex infrastructures; stakeholder action fields where trust, collaboration, cooperation, compromise, competition, or conflict are in play; technology evolution mechanisms where innovation and the recombination of existing technologies occur at all levels; and value exchange fields where community and individual values shift in response to crisis and change. Recovery from crisis is not an event, it is a complex, continuing process, often unpredictable, often unequal in outcomes, but walking a narrow corridor is episodic, uncertain and in the end possible. This is the next normal for marketing.