Marketing through the lens of systems thinking

I recently completed a Systems Thinking course with MIT xPRO. It's hard to put all insights and implications into one post, but here's one way it reinforced the way I think about the marketing function.

Systems thinking is about managing complexity, and one of the tools to do that is introducing levels of abstraction: choosing what details to see and what to ignore at any given zoom level, and learning to jump between them.

Zooming in close enough helps us understand the details of individual parts, far enough - to see how the whole thing behaves, and what new behaviours emerge when the parts work together. That new behaviour is called 𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆 - it comes from the interactions between the parts of the system, and is basically the whole point of creating systems in the first place.

Applied to marketing, there are three levels worth thinking about:

• 🥐 Team members that manage individual channels
• 🥐 The marketing team as a whole
• 🥐 The company

Each level can be seen as its own system, or as part of a bigger one.

The interesting part is what happens at each level. A single channel has ROAS. The marketing team has blended ROAS. The company has ROI. Optimising each level independently only gets you so far. The next chunk of value comes from emergence: the collective behaviours that parts of a system produce together that they wouldn't produce alone.

In practice:

• 🍏 thinking holistically about the whole user journey,
• 🍏 building resources with the bigger picture in mind,
• 🍏 collaborating across teams rather than optimising in silos.

That's emergence in practice - and it's where the next chunk of performance gains comes from.

Sounds like common sense - and it is. But here are two caveats:

• 🥓 The question is 𝒉𝒐𝒘 it's done. Having a bi-weekly catch-up with design or product doesn't automatically imply collaborating across teams.
• 🥓 I've rarely seen it work to its full potential. It's not taught in any of the marketing courses I've done, and in practice plenty of things get in the way: siloed knowledge, misaligned incentives, internal politics.

So yes, it's somewhat idealistic. But once you optimize the hell out of individual channels, a more holistic view is the only place left to find meaningful gains.