The course was organized by the Stockholm School of Economics (Sweden), in collaboration with Hanken School of Economics (Finland) in January – June, 2022.
Course description:
Systems thinking has a long history within the marketing discipline, although it represents a“road less travelled” compared to the mainstream marketing management school of thought. In recent years, an increased emphasis on the dynamic nature of the context within which firms and marketers work has generated a renewed interest in and perceived relevance of asystemic understanding of core marketing phenomena such as value cocreation, brands, markets. Systems thinking, arguably, also plays a key role in equipping marketing with the conceptual tools needed in the effort of tackling the wicked problems which societies across the globeare currently facing.
This course offers an overview of how ideas from general systems theory as well as morespecific streams of systems literature have been used to reframe and enrich the understanding of marketing and its phenomena. In doing so, the course equips the students with a deep understanding of the similarities and differences between different streams of literature under the broad umbrella of “systems thinking,” such as chaos theory, complexity theory and system dynamics as well as thorough knowledge about the core systemic concepts such as interdependence, complex adaptive systems, emergence, and feedback loops, and their marketing implications.
