MARK-MAN Navigator – Planning dimensions 2016

The recently created MARK-MAN Navigator 2016 is devoted to the interplay between practice and theory. We are marketing practitioners and in the course of our business we have studied international marketing and marketing-related journals of the past three years. Around 200 of in total 4,000 articles deal with more or less new issues. They can be condensed into 100 topics from the fields of management, marketing and communication.

We have placed them into the five dimensions of our marketing-navigator: economy, technology, communication, consumer and environment. In doing so we have generated a map of innovative aspects.

Marketing dynamics

The main trend can be called global and intercultural consolidation. It encompasses similarly the starting positions and reported activities. Even if knowledge in marketing grows less intensively than in decades before – as a meta-study suggests – the effect is more than compensated for by tight and intensive applications on the practical level. Such amalgamation of disciplines seems to be the most suitable way to reach and profitably serve customers at all over the world.

Regardless of individual corporate proficiencies, the wide range of offers of goods and services reach all who are in possession of sufficient purchasing power. Highly dynamic competition generates processes across ethnic and geographic as well as political borders. With the additional consequence of accelerated crises.

To generate thriving businesses we – i.e. companies and service providers – must jointly develop new kinds of capabilities, which in practice are able to integrate such a comprehensive set of topics. The first step is a coherent map.

To realize such broad perspectives requires skillful motivators who can convince varied audiences and consistently eliminate and overcome unexpected obstacles. This is required e.g. where product-driven perspectives have to be expanded towards hybrid service offers. But also in managing humanitarian crises.

In doing so, the idea of cyberspatial self-regulation which is portrayed in several popular magazines is rather unhelpfully interlinking the whole set of business processes on digital platforms including the generation of impulses to buy, payment systems and the automatic delivery of goods by drones beyond terrestrial obstacles. The idea is counter-productive when it comes to concrete reality full of permanent challenges – from continuous innovations for smooth traffic flows to environmentally friendly technologies.

The bigger picture

As marketing knows not only strictly economic profit but also the benefit to everyday life as a target, basic questions of the social situation are parts of the apparent agenda. This includes the slightly different economy at the bottom of the income pyramid.

Global and intercultural fusion means to recognize the major context which before was detectable only as isolated items. To generate new offers and solutions from this bigger picture is the specific and practical task for which the Mark-Man Navigator Map would like to serve you.

Find further suggestions in our brief explanations of MARK-MAN Navigator 2016.

© Photography: Bachhausen Visual Productions, Duesseldorf, SMS group.