Complex systems: marketing’s new frontier

Abstract

Complex systems approaches are emerging as new methods that complement conventional analytical and statistical approaches for analyzing marketing phenomena. These methods can provide researchers with tools to understand and predict marketing outcomes that emerge at the aggregate level by modeling feedback between heterogeneous agents and agent interaction with various marketing environmental variables. While the benefits of complex systems approaches often come with a high computational cost, steady advances in access to better computational resources has allowed more researchers to adopt complex systems approaches as part of their portfolio of methods. In this paper, we will provide a description of the key concepts, benefits, and tools of complex systems. The goal of this work is to encourage marketing researchers and practitioners who are not familiar with these approaches to consider the adoption of these methods. We end with a discussion of the future research opportunities that this powerful methodology enables.