At some point in the last decade, marketing professionals collectively decided that the word “strategy” was no longer sufficient. Strategy implied a plan, and a plan implied accountability — a direction chosen, a goal committed to, a future moment when someone would check whether you had arrived. “Ecosystem,” by contrast, implies something living. Something organic. Something that grows and adapts and cannot be fairly evaluated by any single metric because its value emerges from the interactions between components, which are complex and multidimensional and require a certain patience to appreciate. The word “ecosystem” is the greatest accountability shield in the history of marketing vocabulary, and it is absolutely everywhere.
You no longer have a social media presence. You have a “social ecosystem.” You no longer have a group of agency partners. You have a “partner ecosystem.” You no longer have a collection of tools that don’t quite integrate. You have a “technology ecosystem,” and yes, it is a little fragmented, but that’s the nature of ecosystems — they’re complex, and complexity is a feature, not a bug, and please stop asking about the attribution model.
The Ecology of the Word “Ecosystem”
The word entered business vocabulary via the technology industry, where it was used with some precision to describe the relationship between a platform and the developers, businesses, and users who build on top of it. Apple’s ecosystem, in this sense, was a real thing: a set of interdependent actors whose collective behavior created value that none of them could have generated independently. The word was earned, because the phenomenon it described was real and the relationships it implied were specific and measurable.
Then marketing got hold of it, and the word underwent the same transformation that marketing inflicts on every useful concept: it was separated from its precise meaning and redeployed as an atmospheric term. An “ecosystem” now means, approximately, “several things that are related to each other in some way.” Your content ecosystem is your blog, your social accounts, your email list, and possibly a podcast that went on hiatus after eleven episodes. Your media ecosystem is the channels you buy, plus some earned media, plus a YouTube channel that hasn’t been updated since 2022. Your influencer ecosystem is three macro influencers and a spreadsheet of micro-influencers that someone researched last spring.
None of these things are ecosystems in the biological sense. They are collections. They are portfolios. They are, sometimes, just lists. But “list” doesn’t sound like something worth putting on a strategy slide, and “collection” sounds like stamps, and “portfolio” is already overused, and so “ecosystem” has filled the vocabulary gap for everything that is more than one thing but less than a system.
What the Ecosystem Hides
The most important function of “ecosystem” language is what it conceals. A real ecosystem, by definition, has interdependence — the components affect each other, and removing one component changes the behavior of the others. When you call your marketing operations an ecosystem, you imply that this is true of your channels, your tools, your agencies, your content. Often it is not. Often the social team and the CRM team operate in parallel without meaningful connection. Often the content produced for one channel is repurposed for another with no strategy governing the repurposing. Often the agencies are coordinated by a series of email chains rather than by any shared framework. This is not an ecosystem. This is a coordination challenge with a nice name.
Calling it an ecosystem also makes it harder to change. You don’t restructure an ecosystem — you nurture it. You don’t cut parts of an ecosystem — you let them evolve. The vocabulary of living systems imports a set of values (patience, observation, stewardship) that are poorly suited to environments where budget decisions are made quarterly and strategies are revised annually. It is, again, a beautiful accountability shield. The campaign didn’t underperform. The ecosystem is still developing. Give it time. These things are complex.
The Ecosystem That Isn’t Connected
The test of an ecosystem is interdependence: does changing one element affect the others? Run this test on your marketing ecosystem. If you stopped the email newsletter, would it affect performance on paid social? If you paused the content program, would it change the SEO results? If you changed the influencer strategy, would it affect the brand survey numbers? In a genuine ecosystem, yes — all of these things would ripple through the system. In most marketing operations, the honest answer is “probably not very much,” because the channels were built separately, are measured separately, and are managed by teams whose incentives are aligned to their channel rather than to the system as a whole.
That’s not a failure. It’s a reality. Most marketing organizations are not ecosystems; they are departments with overlapping remits and varying degrees of coordination. That’s fine. That’s manageable. What it isn’t is a strategic framework, and calling it one doesn’t make it one. The vocabulary of ecosystems is borrowed from a discipline — ecology — that takes decades to study and centuries to understand. Marketing’s relationship with the term is more like naming your houseplants a “biome.” It sounds grander than it is. The plants don’t care.
Alternatives, If You’re Willing
There is a version of marketing coordination that is genuinely systemic — where channels inform each other, where customer data flows between touchpoints, where the whole is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts. Building that takes time, shared infrastructure, organizational change, and the willingness to measure success in ways that cross channel boundaries. It is harder than drawing an ecosystem diagram. It is also actually useful.
The first step is usually the most uncomfortable: being specific about what you have versus what you aspire to. You have a CRM, a social presence, two agencies, a content program, and a media budget. You aspire to integrate them more effectively so that each reinforces the others. That’s a clear goal. It produces clear questions: what would integration look like? What data needs to be shared? What organizational changes are required? These questions are answerable. “How do we nurture our ecosystem?” is not.
Words matter more in marketing than in most industries, because marketing is made of words, and the words you use internally shape the conversations you have and the decisions you make. If your internal language allows you to call a collection of loosely related activities an “ecosystem,” it is giving you permission to not ask hard questions about whether those activities are actually working together. The NoBriefs shop has no ecosystem. It has products we believe in, people we want to talk to, and the shared conviction that good work is better than impressive-sounding work. The Fuck The Brief line exists specifically for the moment when the language stops describing reality and starts replacing it. That’s not an ecosystem. That’s just marketing. And marketing, at its best, should be honest enough to say so.
