Renegade Marketers Explore a Brave New World.
It begs the question: could such a fresh approach to marketing become New Zealand’s superpower?
Arthur’s Pass, New Zealand. Image: James Wilkes Media 2025
Why would any sane business, design, develop, and sustain, a marketing system that embeds a focus on price instead of value (commodity trap), surrenders information and provenance (story, authenticity, transparency & data) to others, locks in value loss, and transfers most of the reward to those taking the least risk?
The net output of such a system is failure as equity and value are slowly bled off through the channel. This approach creates producer dissatisfaction at the very beginning of the channel and customer disappointment at the very end. It severely limits the richness of connection and engagement across the channel.
And why, when that same system has failed time-and-time again to deliver against expectations, would businesses, business owners, and the managerial class double down and pick a fight with Einstein? We all know doing the same thing over and over again is the definition of insanity. Yet, looking across global economies, markets, and societies, insanity appears to be de rigueur. Common sense on the other hand, appears to be less common.
Professor Ben Wooliscroft and Dr. James Wilkes have been challenging the marketing system status quo for years now, particularly in New Zealand. It is a pursuit that has required a genuine commitment to push through adversity. Human beings do not like being challenged. And for those of you who understand New Zealand’s economy and its addiction to commodity production and the false promise of endless growth, you will appreciate how being different and standing apart from the crowd is an extremely uncomfortable place to be.
Like any addiction, quitting is proving hard to do. Unfortunately, the producer’s addiction to commodity trading comes without any surge of wellbeing or durable ‘rush’. In contrast, it often delivers nothing more than sustained, depressing withdrawal symptoms, as the realities of commodity cycles and price-taking trading continually reassert themselves. Yes, there are some great years here and there, but a forensic examination of history will reveal that most of the time, the good years merely provide respite for the not so good years, which there are many more of. And rinse and repeat.
Price taking is akin to a fool's errand too because there is little hope of sustainable success. It’s akin to an alcoholic who has hit rock bottom looking lovingly up at a bottle of spirits, thinking just one more drink will get them back on track. And whilst, there may well be a moment of respite, their addiction is ultimately going to destroy their health and lives, and the lives of those around them.
A quick reminder. The main problem (there are many) with commodity products, which may, or may not, be branded towards the end of their distribution channels, is they are not traceable, because they are collectively homogeneous and undifferentiated. That means price is going to wag the dog throughout the channel with the end consumer making their decision to purchase on price as well. It could easily be argued that traditional marketing systems are product ‘commodifiers.’
In environments like this, producers lose the motivation to produce goods of a higher quality than those that meet the minimum quality levels to enter the commodity channel. Producer income is a function of quantity and not quality. Production moves towards extracting the most units from the environment, instead of the most value, which is also likely to increase environmental degradation.
So why bother developing a fresh approach? Because Wooliscroft and Wilkes could see the marketing approach being embraced by most New Zealand producers was failing to capture full value for the producer’s efforts. The marketing system meant to serve them was failing to capture value. It was also failing to deliver value to the producer’s consumers. Instead, it was allowing the worst possible outcome to metastasise. It was lose-lose.
So, what if that situation could be turned around to create a win-win. Is that even possible? Well, yes, but there were caveats. They included a willingness and ability to embrace fresh thinking, the motivation to engage with and embrace innovation, along with the capacity to directly confront and challenge the status quo. In other words, to successfully engage with this new thinking, individuals needed to have the capacity to endure a journey that would be anything but comfortable. The reward of course, was entry into a brave new world full of opportunities. Opportunities that were previously unavailable to enterprises relying on flawed marketing approaches to go-to-market.
Unlocking the insights, information, and knowledge embedded in the new technology requires some dedication and patience. Just like driving a manual vehicle there are some basic rules that need to be understood before shifting gears becomes second nature. There are rules to the road. That means it may take some perseverance and patience to engage with the material. Failing some sort of robotic synapses connection or telepathy, some good old-fashioned action-learning will be required. However, once the concept is successfully downloaded you will be able to interact proactively with this new thinking and make it your own.
Ok, let’s dive in a bit more. Enterprises operating inside political systems that champion extraction, commodification of finite resources, and marketing myopia are acutely aware of the declining performance across economic, financial, and societal landscapes. Their enterprises are indeed part of the ecosystem that forms the landscape.
In stark contrast, we need to look at the whole system to optimise the market for the benefit of society, including, producers and consumers, and to minimise costs to the environment. In the past, business research has offered many tools to understand the opportunity for single firms to create or realise value using traditional marketing systems.
Building on the work of Wroe Alderson, Wooliscroft and Wilkes provide a tool—the extended transvection—to analyse a marketing system and provide insights into: information flows, value creation/capture/loss, risk, externalities, equity and fairness, and underperforming marketing systems. Together these insights allow enterprises and their marketers to deeply understand the flaws and disconnects in their go-to-market strategies. Such analysis reveals value-capture and value-delivery opportunities previously hidden from view.
Society, producers, distributors, and governments will not fix underperforming provisioning systems until we can-see them and compare different system opportunities. And remember marketing myopia - which prevents us from seeing fresh opportunities - is the handmaiden of inertia, and the champion of the status quo.
As enterprises struggle to escape the commodity trap to lift profits, marketing systems have become increasingly opaque. This contributes to inequality, climate change and unsustainable outcomes, for example, the need to greenwash. In a world where goods are traded globally, and frequently through long channels, it is difficult to see what has happened in the channel and what effects that channel is having on people and planet. It is important to note that the technology is available to make channels transparent, but it is seldom used.
Digging in further and looking at the range of goods and services a country like New Zealand trades to earn its living, it begs the question: could such a fresh approach to marketing become New Zealand’s superpower? Wooliscroft and Wilkes believe it could. Their evidence-based research paper (link below) provides a method to identify lost potential value in the marketing system. It offers an approach that would enable producers and consumers to derive far superior value from their production and consumption. Surely, that’s a win-win.
Ends.
Link to Research: https://rdcu.be/ettkX
Bio: Dr. James Wilkes is a Western Australian currently based in Christchurch, New Zealand. His career is focused on leveraging his marketing, innovation, and entrepreneurship expertise to help founders start and scale their ideas. These days, he adds his love of photo-journalism and street photography to that mix. He believes a picture paints a thousand words and those thousand words really matter.