In 1968, Swiss researchers invented the quartz movement watch, a revolutionary technology that would eventually decimate their own industry. The Swiss watchmaking establishment, comfortable in their dominance with 65% of worldwide sales, dismissed this innovation as a novelty.
They didn’t even bother to patent it!
When Seiko spotted the prototype at the World Watch Congress that year, they recognized what the Swiss could not: the entire system of timekeeping was about to change. Within a decade, Switzerland’s watchmaking workforce had shrunk from 60,000 to 10,000 employees.
This catastrophic failure wasn’t about technology. It was about thinking.
The WordPress ecosystem finds itself at a similar inflection point today. As AI transforms how we create, distribute, and consume digital content, those who cling to linear marketing models (funnel optimization here, SEO tweaks there) risk becoming the Swiss watchmakers of our era.
The question isn’t whether your marketing tactics work. It’s whether you understand the system they operate within.
What is systems thinking?
Systems thinking refers to a set of capabilities for understanding complex systems: collections of interconnected components that function as cohesive wholes.
One of the unique properties of complex systems is that they cannot be fully understood by analyzing their individual parts alone. They exhibit emergent properties—behaviors and patterns that only become apparent when viewed holistically.
Barry Richmond, one of the early pioneers of systems thinking, described it as the ability to “see both the forest and the trees, with one eye on each”.
Traditional analytical approaches, rooted in reductionism, assume we can understand the whole by breaking it down into manageable pieces. Optimize each component, the thinking goes, and you optimize the system.
But this logic fails spectacularly when applied to modern business scenarios characterized by complex interconnections and non-linear interactions.
Consider your WordPress product’s place in the market. Is it just a plugin competing against other plugins? Or is it part of a broader ecosystem involving hosting providers, theme developers, page builders, agency workflows, client expectations, and evolving technological standards?
The drastic need for systems approaches to marketing
Digital transformation hasn’t just changed marketing, it has fundamentally altered the nature of markets themselves.
Increased interconnectivity, driven by rapid technological development, has created an environment where consumer preferences shift in real-time, brand loyalty evaporates overnight, and yesterday’s competitive advantage becomes today’s technical debt.
WordPress businesses face particular challenges in this landscape. Your customers aren’t just influenced by your messaging; they’re navigating a complex web of online media, community forums, influencer opinions, and peer recommendations.
Their journey from awareness to purchase involves countless touchpoints across diverse channels, each interaction shaping the next in ways that linear models simply cannot capture.
Indeed, the traditional marketing funnel—that persistent metaphor of narrowing possibilities leading inevitably to conversion—now seems almost quaint. Real customer journeys look more like webs of interaction than neat pipelines.
These journeys involve feedback loops, recursive patterns, and sudden phase transitions that defy prediction.
And this complexity isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. But navigating it requires modes of thinking that can embrace interconnection rather than trying to skip over it.
How to become a systems thinker
1. Consider the bigger picture and examine patterns, not metrics
The shift from measurement-focused analysis to pattern recognition represents perhaps the most fundamental change systems thinking brings to marketing.
While traditional approaches obsess over specific KPIs (conversion rates, click-throughs, engagement metrics) systems thinking asks different questions: What relationships exist between these metrics? What feedback loops amplify or dampen your efforts? How do changes to one product or campaign ripple through the entire business?
When you launch a new feature, would you prefer a WordPress product marketer to only measure direct adoption rates? Or would you find it useful if they traced how it influenced support requests, community discussions, competitor responses, and ultimately, the evolution of user expectations?
Now let’s consider the macroscopic trends reshaping the tech industry. AI isn’t just another tool that incrementally improves efficiency; it’s a paradigm shift that’s restructuring the entire system of content creation and user interaction.
Those who view it through a narrow lens—as merely a way to generate blog posts faster, perhaps—miss the systemic shifts it represents. How will AI change what users expect from WordPress products? How will it alter the competitive landscape when barriers to entry collapse? What new ecosystems will emerge?
The Swiss watchmakers viewed quartz movements as simply a different way to power a watch. They failed to see that it would transform manufacturing, pricing, distribution, and ultimately, what consumers expected from a timepiece.
Today’s WordPress marketers face similar systemic disruptions.
2. Frame marketing problems as patterns of behavior over time rather than singular issues
Complex systems exist in constant flux, changing across multiple timescales that occasionally interact in unexpected ways. For example, your plugin’s user base might grow steadily for months, then suddenly spike or crash based on factors that seem entirely unrelated.
Some relationships in marketing ecosystems are linear and predictable. Most are not.
For example, a high-converting ad campaign might trigger increased visibility, leading to more downloads. But it might also spark increased attention from competitors, expose technical issues in the checkout process, or lead to support overwhelm.
In 1998, the US National Park Service faced budget shortfalls and decided to raise entry fees. This was a simple, linear solution to a revenue problem.
What they failed to consider was the balancing feedback loop between price and attendance. Higher fees meant fewer visitors, which meant even greater shortfalls. The intervention not only failed; it amplified the very problem it was meant to solve.
As a marketer, I’ve made similar errors. Raising prices to increase revenue without considering how it affects user acquisition, restructuring PPC campaigns to improve performance without knowing it would tank conversions, adding features to attract customers without recognizing how complexity impacts support costs.
Equally problematic is our tendency to treat each marketing campaign as a discrete event rather than part of an ongoing pattern.
Systems have memory. Today’s campaign performance is influenced by last month’s messaging, last year’s product decisions, and the accumulated weight of every interaction your brand has ever had.
3. Explore multiple, diverse perspectives when seeking to understand problems and situations
Systems thinking recognizes a simple but profound truth: the same system looks different from different vantage points.
What appears as a bug from the developer’s perspective might be a feature from the user’s viewpoint. What seems like competition from your position might be ecosystem evolution from a broader angle.
Dialectical inquiry, the practice of bringing together contradictory perspectives to deepen understanding, offers a powerful tool for WordPress business owners.
When users complain about your pricing, do you defend it or explore what the complaint reveals about perceived value? When competitors copy your features, do you see theft or validation? When the market shifts away from your approach, do you double down or ask what the shift teaches you?
Microsoft’s Zune failed not because it was a poor music player. By many technical measures, it matched or exceeded the iPod. It failed because Microsoft misunderstood what actually made the iPod such a success. They studied the device when they should have studied the experience.
Apple hadn’t just built a better music player; they had created an entire ecosystem of music acquisition, management, and enjoyment. The iTunes Store, the seamless syncing, the intuitive interface. These weren’t features, they were components of a larger experience system that redefined how people related to their music.
What perspectives are you missing in your marketing? Have you truly understood how agencies evaluate plugins differently than individual developers? Do you grasp how non-technical users navigate the ecosystem compared to power users? Can you see your product through the eyes of someone migrating from a different platform entirely?
4. Constantly seek to challenge your existing mental models
Mental models are the internal representations of how we believe the world works. They shape everything we see and everything we miss. In marketing, outdated mental models can lead to poor decisions that have deleterious consequences down the road.
The evolution of customer journey models illustrates this perfectly. The traditional marketing funnel assumed a linear progression from awareness to purchase, with predictable narrowing at each stage.
This model worked reasonably well in an era of limited channels and clear purchase paths. But it becomes actively misleading in today’s environment of recursive journeys, multiple entry points, and non-linear decision-making.
As McKinsey demonstrated with their groundbreaking model of the Consumer Decision Journey, modern purchase decisions involve loops, reversals, and sudden accelerations that the funnel metaphor simply cannot accommodate.
A prime example of the deleterious effects of outdated mental models is the collapse of Polaroid. Despite pioneering digital camera technology, Polaroid’s leadership couldn’t escape their mental model of instant photography as physical prints.
They assumed customers wanted hard copies when the market was embracing purely digital workflows. Their failure to embrace new mental models became their downfall.
What mental models constrain your WordPress marketing? Do you still think in terms of features when users think in terms of outcomes? Do you optimize for search engines when your audience discovers products through community recommendations? Do you build new features based on requests from power users without considering how that might alienate regular customers?
Indeed, as technological disruption continues to reshape customer journeys, with AI assistants now recommending plugins, automated workflows replacing manual tasks, and no-code solutions changing who even constitutes a “developer”, WordPress product owners and marketers must be willing to continuously update their mental models or risk irrelevance.
The path forward
Why should marketing a WordPress product require anything more than good tactics and consistent execution?
The answer lies in the nature of systems themselves. In complex, interconnected environments, small changes can cascade into massive transformations. A single plugin can reshape entire workflows. A new technology can obsolete entire categories. An emerging platform can redirect the entire current of user attention.
This brings us to uncomfortable questions that systems thinking forces us to confront:
What if success in WordPress marketing isn’t about winning the game but recognizing when the game itself has changed?
What if the metrics we optimize for are going to be irrelevant in the near future?
What if our greatest competitive advantage isn’t in what we build but in how we perceive the system we’re building within?
These aren’t questions with clean answers. They’re invitations to think differently about the challenges we face. To see patterns where others see problems. To recognize connections where others see isolation. To embrace complexity where others seek simplification.