Business Storytelling: TED.com

Dan Cobley spoke about the relationship between marketing and physics on TED.com and this is quite interesting because most marketers would not identify the two as relative. Cobley says that physics taught him something about marketing and with this he opens fellow marketers’ eyes through the use of physics and marketing parallels. The following are the physics principles and how they translate to marketing:

Newton’s Second Law is “the acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the magnitude of the net force, in the same direction as the net force, and inversely proportional to the mass of the object.” (Physics Classroom)

Newton’s Second Law – the bigger the brand the harder it is to change the position of the brand.

The Uncertainty Principle says that you cannot measure any property without interacting with it in someway; therefore you can never measure all the properties exactly. Furthermore, the idea of a perfectly predictable world cannot be true based on this principle.

Heisenberg Law  (Uncertainty Principle) - Try to measure what consumers actually do instead of what they say they’re going to do.

The Scientific Method holds that you cannot prove the hypothesis, you can only disapprove it.

Scientific Method – no matter how much you’ve invested in your brand, one bad week can ruin your brand.

Entropy is the second law of thermodynamics – an energy related principle. “Entropy is a measure of the amount of energy in a closed system that is no longer available to effect changes in that system.” (Carrier)

Increasing Entropy – your brand is more dispersed, don’t fight it, embrace it and make it work for your brand.

Cobley demonstrated physics relationship to marketing and if the principles are applied to any specific brand, it would seem to be beneficial and progressive. Who would think that physics had any place in marketing? Personally this speech showed me that all things are relative to marketing.

Resources:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_cobley_what_physics_taught_me_about_marketing.html

www.physics.nus.edu.sg/einstein/lect13/lect13.ppt

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/newtlaws/u2l3a.cfm

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/entropy.html