Marketing systems: A Listen, Learn, Leverage Framework

Abstract

Macromarketing provides the conceptual ground to understand marketing dynamics in a systems setting. Social marketing offers an implementation platform through which collective behavioral change may be accomplished. Qualitative system mapping from systems thinking delivers potentially powerful tools for macromarketing and social marketing in their non-linear causality pursuits. The central theme of the paper is to unveil the marketing dynamics of a complex problem. A MAS informed social marketing systems approach is presented through an inter-disciplinary case study to address the complex challenge of increasing influenza vaccination rates in a hospital systems setting. We identify the dominant behavioral and structural dynamics blocking the desired collective behaviors which present potential opportunities to interrupt the system’s current trajectory. We capture the paradoxically contradicting group choices to systemic outcomes. We show how highly participatory understandings can act as the basis for integrated multilevel, multi-stakeholder interventions to alter the evolutionary patterns over time and space in a system. We conclude that the listening, learning and leveraging processes of undertaking qualitative marketing systems dynamics mapping for collective behavioral change are a potent way forward.