Chapter 3 - The Marketplace & Uncertainty
The default nature of the marketplace is uncertainty. We simply do not know what will happen around the corner. Building, capturing, communicating, delivering, investing in, marketing or selling value to customers, consumers or stakeholders has the same faint confidence as a 14-day weather forecast. This fog of the marketplace can roll in from offshore any time, creating havoc with our actuarial minds, algorithmic strategies and precise financial navigation tools. What are we to do?
The Marketplace & Uncertainty - Components:
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Introduction
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Augmented Brands: 21st Century Uncertainty Tesseracts and FLIRTing with the Marketplace (Sean Moffitt)
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Learning through Doing: Experiment Broadly and Turn Creative Learning into Value (Asha Singh)
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Stuff Happens – It’s a Gift: Values + Preparation= Creating Value from Uncertainty (Jacqui d'Eon)
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The Customer Zeitgeist: The Slot Machine for Marketplace Bets over the Next Decade (Sean Moffitt)
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Chapter Conclusion
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Five Highlights from The Marketplace and Uncertainty:
We've entered a New Marketplace Era - The Augmented Brands Era (2020-2035)
We defined this new era as a response to the scarcities of the previous era, powerful brand drivers and shifts in technology, media and transportation. We determined that the Augmented era required the ability and need for organizations and their brands to create smarter, continually relevant experiences and problem solving breakthroughs.
How to Truly Enhance the Lives of Customers - FLIRT a little
We built a five x three step approach comprised of methods and tools designed to build global stalwarts and hungry underdog brands for this era's Augmented age named FLIRT - Focus, Language, Incentives, Rules and Tools..
Learning Through Doing - Leveraging the Spirit of Experimentation to Drive Value
We dramatized putying our energy into creating conditions for good things to emerge, rather than the energy-intensive approach of elaborating a vision, engaging people in it and taking them with us or driving them forwards. We build an intuitively smart nine step model to step back, go deeper and experiment & refine for marketplace solutions.
Values + Preparations = Delivery of Marketplace Value from Uncertainty
We rooted ourselves in authentic values and advance preparation for change in an uncertain marketplace landscape. We adopted a mindset of accepting uncertaoinity as a gift to open ourselves and our organizations to new opportunities and new ways of getting things done..
Harnessing the Customer Zeitgeist to Deliver Sustainable Marketplace Value
We made the argument that the smartest bets in the future marketplace were in marrying and combining longer term customer shifts and macrotrends with various strategies and operations as a pivotal solution. We listed and ranked the top twenty customer macrotrends over the next decade that would influence. marketplace winners, losers and innovators.
THE MARKETPLACE
AND UNCERTAINTY
The main sources of marketplace instability and risk are quixotic below-the-surface unknowns and beneath-the-Street factors. As Antoine de Saint Exupery once mused, “what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
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In our current uncertain world, firms that grow faster in the marketplace (and the leaders who direct them) enjoy four distinct advantages: they augment their customers life, they experiment broadly and turn creative learning into value, they proof themselves effectively being steered by their values, and they create smarter, more personalized and authentic experiences.
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Remember market fluctuations, rising market fears, and sentiment extremes may create chaos for many people but also kindling for opportunistic innovators, contrarian mindsets and patient investors who are able to wade through the haze of uncertainty and risk, and gather a sharper longer term view.
To find the truth, sometimes you have to travel through some dense marketplace fog. It's not for the faint of heart and best done together.
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The Marketplace & Uncertainty Inspiration and Call to Actions:
“What you really want to do in selling, marketing, investing and innovating, is figure out what's important, knowable, testable and valuable. If it's unimportant, unknowable, untestable or lacking value, you should quickly forget about it.”
Get immersed in marketplace uncertainty. Let us know what you think.
Burning question? Bulk sales? Follow up interest? Connect with the authors? Interview with contributor? Want to get involved in our next publication? When nothing is certain, anything and everything is possible.
