The Next Normal for Marketing — The Dynamics of a Pandemic, Provisioning Systems, and the Changing Patterns of Daily Life

Pandemics, climate warming, growing inequality, and much more bring crises that change the patterns of daily life in human communities, directly impacting the provisioning systems that form in a community to meet the needs and wants of individuals, groups, and entities for goods, services, experiences, ideas. Provisioning systems sometimes begin as leadership initiated top-down, authoritarian prescriptive supply networks, public and private. Sometimes, they originate as bottom-up, self-organized, innovative, open choice, often informal, exchange based networks, and mostly, over time, they emerge as untidy self-organized multi-level diverse assemblages of both. The diversity of provisioning systems in a community enables crisis resilience, but limits efficiency and control. The provisioning systems that form in these ways are complex, multi-level, non-linear evolutionary systems, often unpredictable, and lacking direction. Balancing a desire for stability and an appetite for diversity, innovation, and change in shaping a provisioning system is like walking a narrow corridor on the edge of chaos. Achieving balance, avoiding slipping into chaos, rests on the management of a set of complex social mechanisms. These embrace delivery mechanisms where value is produced and consumed through complex infrastructures; stakeholder action fields where trust, collaboration, cooperation, compromise, competition, or conflict are in play; technology evolution mechanisms where innovation and the recombination of existing technologies occur at all levels; and value exchange fields where community and individual values shift in response to crisis and change. Recovery from crisis is not an event, it is a complex, continuing process, often unpredictable, often unequal in outcomes, but walking a narrow corridor is episodic, uncertain and in the end possible. This is the next normal for marketing.