[1] There is more science in brands than you think
Why are there brands at all?
Why are there brands at all? This ia a subset of the question 'Why is there anything at all?' Taking my cue from the prevailing scientific myth (SN Salthe 2002) I think it is because the consumer universe uses brand configurations to dissipate energy gradients. I shall expand on this for however long it takes.
We live in a very small and seemingly very special part of an apparently expanding universe. Understanding the universe is a very compelling yet strangely elusive ideal. How do we understand something that keeps growing and about which new facts continue to emerge. This particular part of the conceptual universe – the world of ideas and thoughts about the universe itself - has attracted the attention of the most brilliant minds in recorded history and will continue to do so with an ever-increasing attractive force. As we begin to grasp the complexity and the enormity, the special and the general, the beauty and the risk, that which have always been relegated to the background, cosmic wall-paper, will fill and dominate the centre-stage. In Refuges for Life in a Hostile Universe[1] Gonzalez and his co-authors paint one of the most fascinating pictures ever to be hung in the cosmologists’ gallery. A very small part of our galaxy is habitable and ‘The broader universe looks even less inviting than our own galaxy.’ It would seem – to use their words – that we live in prime real estate. Clearly therefore we have to agree with their concluding observation: Any extraterrestrial civilisation seeking a new world would place our solar system on their home shopping list.
[1] Scientific American Volume 285 Number 4 October 2001 pp 52 - 59
The Business Universe
A business, a large enterprise, an organisation is by analogy an entity which lives and struggles for survival in an expanding universe. It is stunning, even chilling, to be present when business owners realise that they live (or have lived) on prime real estate, or that their customers have been placed on someone’s shopping list. The realisation that organisational tenure is less than solid, at best uncertain and by most accounts unpredictable is a discomforting one indeed. As far as the universe is concerned it is easy to understand that the problem or challenge was, until recently at least, too large and therefore beyond the grasp of the single human mind. This is where modern computers prove both useful and essential. They allow us to investigate the dynamic changes that occur over vast numbers of time steps and with a large numbers of initial options. The work done by Gonzalez et al was neither conceivable nor possible a generation ago. The business universe is no different and the themes that set the cosmology debate apart are today as much part of the mind and vocabulary of the strategist as of the cosmologist – complexity, emergence and self-organisation.
Why are there brands at all? This ia a subset of the question 'Why is there anything at all?' Taking my cue from the prevailing scientific myth (SN Salthe 2002) I think it is because the consumer universe uses brand configurations to dissipate energy gradients. I shall expand on this for however long it takes.
We live in a very small and seemingly very special part of an apparently expanding universe. Understanding the universe is a very compelling yet strangely elusive ideal. How do we understand something that keeps growing and about which new facts continue to emerge. This particular part of the conceptual universe – the world of ideas and thoughts about the universe itself - has attracted the attention of the most brilliant minds in recorded history and will continue to do so with an ever-increasing attractive force. As we begin to grasp the complexity and the enormity, the special and the general, the beauty and the risk, that which have always been relegated to the background, cosmic wall-paper, will fill and dominate the centre-stage. In Refuges for Life in a Hostile Universe[1] Gonzalez and his co-authors paint one of the most fascinating pictures ever to be hung in the cosmologists’ gallery. A very small part of our galaxy is habitable and ‘The broader universe looks even less inviting than our own galaxy.’ It would seem – to use their words – that we live in prime real estate. Clearly therefore we have to agree with their concluding observation: Any extraterrestrial civilisation seeking a new world would place our solar system on their home shopping list.
[1] Scientific American Volume 285 Number 4 October 2001 pp 52 - 59
The Business Universe
A business, a large enterprise, an organisation is by analogy an entity which lives and struggles for survival in an expanding universe. It is stunning, even chilling, to be present when business owners realise that they live (or have lived) on prime real estate, or that their customers have been placed on someone’s shopping list. The realisation that organisational tenure is less than solid, at best uncertain and by most accounts unpredictable is a discomforting one indeed. As far as the universe is concerned it is easy to understand that the problem or challenge was, until recently at least, too large and therefore beyond the grasp of the single human mind. This is where modern computers prove both useful and essential. They allow us to investigate the dynamic changes that occur over vast numbers of time steps and with a large numbers of initial options. The work done by Gonzalez et al was neither conceivable nor possible a generation ago. The business universe is no different and the themes that set the cosmology debate apart are today as much part of the mind and vocabulary of the strategist as of the cosmologist – complexity, emergence and self-organisation.
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