Marketplace diversity and navigating a path forward in the face of ongoing change

This is my 9th installment in a series on marketplace diversity in Business Strategy and Operations (see postings 160-162, 167, 172, 174, 180 and 182) and so far I have been discussing marketplace diversity and responses to the challenges and opportunities that creates, as if this were largely a stable and even static system. The one quality you can in fact always rely on as staying relevant and current in the marketplace is, however, change.

Fashions and styles change and we can always expect a steady flow of at least minor upgrades to existing products and services. Major more fundamental version changes may not come out as often, at least for any given business provider but they arise and enter the market on a very regular basis too. And entirely new products and services are continually coming out too, even if at a still slower rate for most industries. Collectively this can all be seen as the steady and certain flow of standard change, and it meshes with and services the steady evolution of customer and potential customer needs and preferences, including their desire for new and different per se. At least for purposes of this posting, I would denote all of this as type 1 change.

Type 1 change is only one part of change per se and the other is much more profound and disruptive, and both for producers and for consumers in the marketplace. If insights gained from crowd sourcing can help you as a business to navigate your way through type 1 change as to what you should be providing and competing with, the second form of change is where you need to be able to accommodate the emergence of marketplace factors such as crowd sourcing per se. This, I will refer to here as type 2 change and I add that most of what I have been writing and posting to my directory Ubiquitous Computing and Communications – everywhere all the time has been about type 2 change.

• Change drives marketplace diversity, and shapes and compels businesses to change in response if those businesses are to remain relevant, and even viable.
• Developing and offering any given unique value proposition is not and cannot be a fixed goal. Successfully developing and offering unique value propositions for a business can at most simply be considered developing towards a moving target that has to be continually rediscovered.

In this, I would argue that a product such as Coca Cola cannot be considered much of a unique value proposition per se even if no other business has ever successfully determined and copied its secret proprietary formula. The market is flooded with cola beverages and most of the original uniqueness of Coca Cola per se is long since gone – which I presume is why they keep coming out with new Coca Cola products to try and recapture New.

Looking at business and marketplace diversity from the ecological systems perspective that I discussed in recent series posting, the overall business ecosystem is continually changing and evolving, and niches with it have to do so to, in order to remain viable and relevant. (See Global Marketplace Diversity as Business Ecosystem Niche Space, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.) And while static models of marketplace diversity offer value, dynamic models are needed too, in order to successfully compete and long term.

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