COMPLEXITY, ENTROPY AND MARKETING

This present work will take into account two interconnected levels of observation of systemic phenomena, applied by analogy to businesses. The first observation level represents the enterprise as a viable system, where management must develop different approaches in order to achieve survival through the creation and/or maintenance of relationships with those stakeholders considered to be relevant, influenced above all by the structural elements of the contexts. The other, macro, level represents the market as a system, relatively isolated in a similar way to the company. As an expression of the relational dynamics between the direct and indirect systems of which it is composed, this system exchanges energy and information with the reference contexts in order to survive. As part of these exchanges and adaptations both the micro enterprise system and the macro marketing system disperse energy, causing a dissipative phenomenon defined, by analogy with the second law of thermodynamics, as entropy. Therefore, the objectives of this work are to ask: can the theory of complexity help marketers to understand the markets in which they have linked and contingent exchanges with others, and in this way improve/adapt the economic-environmental-social behaviour of companies/brands, increasing the chances of survival in these markets? Does learning about organizations and networks as adaptive systems help researchers and managers in their processes as decision-makers?