Rethinking the Future of Marketing

Rethinking the Future of Marketing

From Nation States to Networks

John Naisbitt is arguably the world's leading trend forecaster. In his essay: From Nation States to Networks, Dr. Naisbitt predicts that global economy will not be dominated by huge multinational companies but by big networks in the twenty-first century. He defines big networks as "a lot of individuals networked together" and who do not have any headquarters. It is very powerful because everyone feels he/she is in the center. Small companies are less bureaucratic, and react quicker to market and innovation. It is the small companies who are creating the global economy. Big companies can only survive when they reconstitute themselves as a collection of small companies. That is the reason why Fortune 500 now constitutes only 10 percent of the United States economy, down from 20 percent as recently as 1970. Using tourism as an example, the author shows that this biggest industry employs one out of nine people in the world. Tourism is made up of millions and millions of entrepreneurs, and it will get even bigger in the twenty-first century as the world become more and more affluent.

Tourism shows how beautiful small is, but what is really beautiful in this context is appropriate scale. With the aid of new technology, an individual's power has been extended. The author states that the revolution in telecommunications is "simultaneously creating the huge, global, single market economy, while making the parts smaller and more powerful". Advance in technology allows individual to communicate ideas among friends and colleagues. They help to put together all of these ideas in thousands of combinations, and some of them are perhaps even unimaginable today. This is wh...

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...the actual state of nature we all live and survive in. That also includes the need to adapt to change. When an organization can shed components as easily as a "Virtual" organization, its ability to survive rapidly change in a market is enhanced.

He sums up the article by noting the most successful "Biological" business is one that works in harmony with the ecology. In so doing the business will not pollute and provides products that are friendly to the people who use them and to nature itself. An example would be a power generating plant that recycles the pollutants that are generated into a resource used by another production process. Thus, a closed system is used to produce the tools needed by people to run other businesses and live their lives. In short, he states "the more biological we make the processes, the safer they are for humans and for the environment".