Your Market, Your Business

Webster's defines a market as "a meeting together of people, at a stated time and place, for the purpose of private purchase and sale." The term can also refer to any of the individual elements: the place, the people, or the process of buying and selling.

In Frankfurt they do business in ein markt, in Paris dans un marché. All of these words stem from the Latin noun mercatus, which was also a verb meaning "to trade or traffic in something." The root noun in Latin, merx (merchandise), is related to merces (payment or reward) and also to the verb mercere (to earn or deserve). In the ancient Roman pantheon Mercury was the winged messenger, the bringer of news, information and disinformation, and the god of markets. His name was later attached to the fastest-moving planet in our solar system.

Today, the place can be cyberspace, the "people" can be software shopbots, and the actual transaction can involve nothing more than the reshuffling of 1's and 0's in a couple of databases. Markets are still a set of inter-related relationships which continuously act on and react to each other.

Markets are mercurial: slippery, hard to grasp and harder to control. If you want a better idea of what's likely to happen in your market, it's very helpful to define the key relationships. Next, you need to understand how your main networks depend on each other and where they are independent from each other. Once you know how where and when you can take action, you can begin to work with the dynamics of your critical business relationships.