Of Population dynamics, economics and epidemic marketing

They have discovered that electricity and magnetism is related, they say that humans evolved from apes though they have never found what they proudly call "the missing link" and they are nowhere near the GUT - the general unification theory , the holy grail of science.

So here in my own small way I propose an idea that might help "their" cause a bit.

The business world borrows most of its ideas from the natural world and animal populations and business strategies evolve in the same manner

Now what does Darwin have to do with Welch ? A lot actually....

If u follow economic theory then you would have come across the Cournot's duopoly model. This is a very famous model that defines how a firm should act when faced by a competitor in a closed environment provided they both dont know how the other is going to react. Then if you take the trouble of graphing out the profits that each firm gets...you are left with a quadratic equation that produces an concave graph...one that has a maxima.

Now comes the interesting part.....

If you graph out the population levels that exist for any kind of animal population in a closed environment....like a school of tuna fish with limited feeding resources.....then over a period of time it would follow the exact same shape......there would be generation, increase of population, decrease to a sustainable level and finally extinction.

Compare that to a typical product lifecycle that most marketing gurus in the world swear by ( ok not swear by but teach ).....its the same shape.The fabled cycle of introduction (birth), growth, maturity, decline and extinction.

So we have 3 different phenomenon- strategy, population and marketing following the same basic lifecycle. So, this prompts the thought that the business world borrows heavily from the Darwinian theory of evolution....

The behavior of an organization (both the firms and the animal population being organizations with defined hierarchies) would remain essentially the same whatever be its surrounding in the sense that the Darwinian laws of competition and the survival of the fittest apply. Now the question is can this hypothesis be extended to the social setting where a human population also has the same hierarchical structure albeit not as explicitly stated or properly defined as that of a school of fish or a colony of ants. This is where I believe that population dynamics will meet swarm theory.

I believe that the overall size of the population in a closed ecosystem (population dynamics) will be affected by Darwin’s laws but how the existing population behaves at a particular moment can be mapped by swarm theory. The center of the population and its outline will define the entire population and this can be utilized by today’s modern marketers for their benefit.

So the conclusion is that if u are an animal ( at heart or otherwise) ...you should know business...they are related