Cited by the Wall Street Journal as the leading framework for brand management in the information age, Blue Spoon's concept of 'marketing ecosystems' was developed to synthesize strategy, media, content, and distribution platforms for in-line products. At a time where boundaries are dissolving across industries, the idea of "enterprise-wide" must move beyond the edges of a company's assets or its own sources of information. Competitive advantage in this liquid world will now come from designing and managing ecosystems that connect adjacent business landscapes. This is opportunity space for growth and systemic collaboration that spans industry environments, where the idea of "brand" shifts from a product-centric view to a system-level view.

A sophisticated approach to establish holistic metrics for performance, marketing ecosystems align a network of actors around shared market space. Breakthrough ideas come from architectural innovation: linking the digital and the physical in ways that have never been linked before. Marketing ecosystems enable novel solutions at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels. They are characterized by:

• Amplified power. Marketing ecosystems configure businesses and their ideas into new wholes with mutually-reinforcing effects. Instead of searching for technical solutions or selling partial approaches, marketing ecosystems leverage a systems framework to enable new markets and to plan for new dimensions of performance.
• The creation of novelty. Marketing ecosystems provide a new language to communicate strategic concepts, and to provide original answers to questions posed by pragmatically-minded business managers. They are a step forward in confronting a mass of new phenomena and complexity with new ideas and perspective.
• Aligned innovation. Marketing ecosystems help manage the traffic between ideas and behavior. They weave together the flow of technological advances, and new opportunity space for creativity, into a framework that directs perpetual innovation.
• New forms of competitive advantage. Marketing ecosystems shift the view of ‘brand’ as the primary unit of business strategy to an aggregated view of strategy and action at a system level. Creativity centers on strategy design to influence an environment of changes and opportunities simultaneously. This framework can operate at the level of an individual brand, market segment, business unit, or industry.
• New rules of the game. Marketing ecosystems change the nature of competition. Rather than duplicating what already exists or trying to squeeze more life out of worn-out paradigms, marketing ecosystems transform marketplace forces to drive break-out results in top-line growth and earnings, achieve competitor lock-out, and create an advantage that competitors are unable to replicate.