Isaac Newton and the Future of Marketing

Last year I wrote this post as part of my ongo­ing series The Physics of Markeitng.  The post dis­cussed ways that Newton’s Law of Grav­ity might per­tain to mar­ket­ing.  There were some excel­lent com­ments about the post and it has actu­ally led me to think dif­fer­ently about the mar­ket­ing — past, present, and future.  Par­tic­u­larly, a com­ment my brother in law Chad, an engi­neer by trade, made about the for­mula for grav­ity itself.

The grav­i­ta­tional force between any two bod­ies can be described as follows:

F = G*M1*M2/d^2

So the force (F) is lin­early pro­por­tional to mass but the dis­tance effect is squared. So if you dou­ble the dis­tance (d), the force drops to 1/4^th. Being close to your cus­tomers is more impor­tant than being big.

The last cen­tury of mar­ket­ing was largely about mass.  Lim­ited media chan­nels and con­straints regard­ing infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion made mass a great approach.  Get big by buy­ing up the media chan­nels for your prod­uct, draw­ing cus­tomers in through your sheer mass.  Prox­im­ity was secondary.

In the future, I believe that mar­ket­ing will be much more about prox­im­ity than about mass.  Tech­nol­ogy plays a large part in this shift.  With frag­mented media,  a mil­lion chan­nels of dis­tri­b­u­tion, an empow­ered and con­sumer dri­ven world, google search, mobile devices, blogs, social net­works, and other shifts in how we con­sume and dis­trib­ute infor­ma­tion, mass is just not as easy as it once was.  How­ever, prox­im­ity has never been eas­ier.  Peo­ple will tell you what they want, when they want it, and often will do so for free.  Now a busi­ness can more eas­ily than ever engage with peo­ple, know the value they deliver, make friends, and get closer to their customers.

Just as with Newton’s the­ory, prox­im­ity is truly more pow­er­ful than mass when it comes to word of mouth adver­tis­ing.  If you oper­ate in close prox­im­ity  to your cus­tomers — lis­ten­ing to them and meet­ing their needs in new and cre­ative ways — you will gen­er­ate pos­i­tive word of mouth and grow expo­nen­tially.  This costs noth­ing and yields bet­ter results than any form of adver­tis­ing known to man.  (Except per­haps Richard Sim­mons / Gene Sim­mons.  They are of another universe.)

Does this mean big brands and mass adver­tis­ing meth­ods will be gone?  No, mass will remain part of the equa­tion, but it will be approached with a dif­fer­ent mind­set.  It will become sec­ondary to prox­im­ity.  Mass is more dif­fi­cult to achieve, and attrac­tion or grav­ity almost impos­si­ble to sus­tain with­out prox­im­ity.  So as you approach your mar­ket­ing, think not about how do I “get the word out” to get cus­tomers to grav­i­tate to your busi­ness, but more about “how do I get and stay closer to my cus­tomers and the cit­i­zens whom I would like to become my customers.”

Real­ize though that prox­im­ity has impli­ca­tions.  You are going to have to lis­ten to your cus­tomers.  You may be forced to actu­ally change your busi­ness — and not just your logo -  as a result of mov­ing toward prox­im­ity.  If you are up close and per­sonal, cus­tomers are going to be able to see through any trick­ery, so be authen­tic.  (Keep it real YO!)

Seek to help peo­ple, under­stand peo­ple, and lis­ten to peo­ple. This is all much dif­fer­ent from the Mass approach of just be big­ger and louder.  It is also bet­ter than that approach in my opin­ion.   To get grav­ity, start with a focus on proximity.