Example of Describing the Supersystem's Area of Interest
Let's look at an example of a description for cell 1.1 in the 3x3 Table.
In marketing, people often talk about concepts such as customer problems or dissatisfaction (of the target audience). These are important concepts in entrepreneurial activity, but it's necessary to understand how they relate to systems concepts from the supersystem's area of interest, such as opportunities, needs, and external project roles.
For example, a marketer identifies a group of people or agents (such as companies) who could potentially play external project roles related to the client base (buyer, user, payer, etc.). This group of people or agents is called the target audience or target group. There are applied marketing practices[1], which make it possible to describe potential representatives of the target audience. For example, they describe their problems and dissatisfaction, and compile a client profile.
Sometimes people talk about needs, which are included in Maslow's hierarchy. However, it's important not to confuse the word "need" as used in Maslow's theory[2] with its meaning in systems thinking: the first refers to the agent, while the second refers to the project role. From here on, we will refer to a need in the Maslow sense as the agent's dissatisfaction (or problem), and reserve the term "need" for when we are talking specifically about the needs of external project roles (not the agent).
To describe agents, characteristics such as age, gender[3], place of residence, social status, competencies and education, available resources (weekly time, finances), and so on are used. These characteristics are necessary to understand the "intention" of these people. The main task of marketing is to ensure that people from the target audience take on the role of buyer, and then the role of user.
Therefore, it is necessary to separately address:
- the dissatisfaction and problems of people from the target audience[4];
- the needs of external project roles played by people from this target audience.
Problems and dissatisfaction place (force, stimulate) people into certain project roles, and when they begin to act in these project roles, they have corresponding needs. In other roles, these same people may have completely different needs.
This example once again demonstrates the importance of paying close attention to concepts from different theories, and how systems thinking helps to quickly understand these concepts and connect them to each other.
These practices analyze the characteristics of the target audience and create a client profile. However, we will not discuss such applied practices in this course. ↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs ↩︎
Although modern marketing theories do not recommend focusing on such characteristics, and instead emphasize agents' behavioral factors. ↩︎
With specific people as representatives of the target audience. People's dissatisfaction is described not only in Maslow's hierarchy. Here are a few more sources: https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/needs-inventory, https://baynvc.org/list-of-needs/. And note that there is no pyramid there. ↩︎