The Physics of Marketing — Hooke’s Law

Sci­en­tist, Physi­cist, Math­e­mati­cian and all around genius Robert Hooke lived in the mid 1600’s.  Much of his work revolved around his law of elas­tic­ity, which stated that elas­tic mate­ri­als stretch in pro­por­tion to the force applied to them.  Some mate­ri­als are more elas­tic than oth­ers.  Under­stand­ing this prin­ci­ple allowed for sailors to mea­sure lon­gi­tude, archi­tects to design amaz­ing struc­tures, peo­ple to use pocket watches, and bungee jumpers to… well… to jump of bridges and sur­vive.  In short, strain causes stress, and cer­tain mate­ri­als respond dif­fer­ently to stress.

At risk of sound­ing redun­dant from last week’s post, I think this again illus­trates the impor­tance of treat­ing dif­fer­ent cus­tomers dif­fer­ently.  Choose your best cus­tomers and design your prod­ucts, ser­vices, and your cus­tomer expe­ri­ences to cap­i­tal­ize on their com­mon elas­tic prin­ci­ples.  Give your best cus­tomers more of what they want, and work on giv­ing value up front in exchange for bring­ing them back again and again.  Give to get.  Give more, get more, find new ways to give more and on and on.

Bear in mind, dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als have dif­fer­ent elas­tic prin­ci­ples.  Some are highly elas­tic, and oth­ers not at all.  Con­sumers are the same.  Find the right group, and then do some­thing amaz­ing for them.

What is your inter­pre­ta­tion of Hooke’s Law as it per­tains to mar­ket­ing?  Please fur­ther the dis­cus­sion by shar­ing your thoughts in the form of a comment.