Marketing helps the company to adopt a new role, and by interacting with the
stakeholders builds competences to successfully maintain that new role. These
competences also require a new kind of resilience and agility of companies, and also an
ability to adapt to changing market forces without controlling them. Many marketing
phenomena are no longer invented by suppliers, as social media has clearly
demonstrated. Information of both hard and soft forms must be constantly generated
to achieve an in-depth understanding of the markets in order to make strategic
decisions that are in tune with customers and other stakeholders’ interests.
Furthermore, marketing metrics must reflect a more holistic and inclusive
perspective. These metrics should be oriented towards the future and be based on
customers perceptions of the value created together in the network rather than static,
simplistic and disconnected metrics focused on the past. Data do not speak for
themselves, but have to be interpreted, which means that developing even more
sophisticated metrics is not recommended. Instead, metrics have to be adjusted to a
pragmatic level, be easy to apply in everyday operations, direct practitioners towards
desired results and not consume too many resources.