4 marketing lessons to learn from physics, a really awesome thing to observe while doing a parallel between these two. Of course, you still need plenty of imagination and creativity mixed in the pot, to actually spot the common grounds. This fascinating creative exercise is performed by Dan Cobley in his 7-minute speech at TED. Playing with these two, he soon unveils 4 rules that physics and marketing share in common:

#1 Newton’s Law – Force=Mass x Acceleration

The bigger the mass of a certain object, the more force is needed in order to change its course.

The same can be applied to brands: the more massive/complex a brand is, the more baggage it carries, the more effort is needed to influence its course in the market (think of positioning, advertising etc.)

#2 Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

It’s impossible to measure precisely the state (position, momentum) of a particle, because the act of measuring it, by definition, changes it. The act of observation changes it.

It’s the same with marketing: the act of observing consumers changes their behavior, they get biased from the research. So, it’s safer to measure what consumers actually do instead what they say they do or intend to do.

#3 The Scientific Method

You cannot prove a hypothesis through observation, you can only disprove it

You can gather many data points around a hypothesis, it will strengthen it but it will not conclusively prove it. And only one data point, if opposite, can blow away your theory.

Here, the marketing lesson is: regardless of the investment you put in a brand, one mistake or a bad decision at a particular point in time can undermine decades of success and good work.

#4 Increasing Entropy

The entropy, which is a measure of a system’s disorder, will always increase.

The marketing lesson is: nowadays, with the evolution of the digital and social media tools available to every single one of the consumers, it’s impossible to control where your brand goes. Your brand starts being dispersed, your brand starts being part of the conversation out there. You cannot control the reactions/comments/reviews toward your brand. As Dan Cobley says, marketers shouldn’t fight this but they should embrace it and find ways of working with it.

These 4 rules are no news to the marketing world, any marketer with a bit of experience is highly familiarized by now. What’s fascinating is the way these principles come alive when looking at them through the magnifying glass of physics.

Here is Dan Cobley’s presentation at TED:

If you liked this post, you can also read the following:

• transforming a funky bottle into a social brand
• the Dam Square singer
• the internet will eventually find out
• ‘relevant abruption’