The Physics of Marketing — Huygens’ Principle

Chris­ti­aan Huygens

You would think that if you did some­thing like dis­cover the rings of Sat­urn, dis­cover Saturn’s largest moon — Titan — and then go on to invent and patent the first pen­du­lum clock, that you would be a house­hold name.  Now assume you not only did all those things, AND also col­lab­o­rated with Robert Hooke, Isaac New­ton, and Rene Descartes dur­ing your career.  Pretty impres­sive resume to say the least.

The per­son I am describ­ing is 17^th cen­tury Dutch Physi­cist Chris­ti­aan Huy­gens.  To say this guy was smart and influ­en­tial is like say­ing Jimmy Hen­drix was a pretty good gui­tar player who had a few good songs.   Huy­gens was a thought leader of his time, with a very impres­sive body of work.  One of his pri­mary dis­cov­er­ies was that of Huy­gens’ Prin­ci­ple which pre­dicts the pro­gres­sion of waves.

Huy­gens stated that “every point on a wave­front acts like a new source of wave energy, with match­ing fre­quency and phase.”  Thus when you drop a peb­ble in water, the wave front each of the rip­ples that spreads out in a cir­cu­lar expand­ing fash­ion rep­re­sents a new set of waves.  Another exam­ple of this is observed when you hear some­one in an adja­cent room shout­ing, the sound actu­ally enters the room you are in through the door­way.  So to you the sound, the vibra­tion of air via sound­waves, orig­i­nates at the doorway.

In Mar­ket­ing terms this seem to equate nicely to the con­cept of word of mouth mar­ket­ing.  Sup­pose you were to have an awful ser­vice encounter with a busi­ness, the ini­tial wave would then be cre­ated.  If for exam­ple, this were in a restau­rant where the food was bad, the ser­vice poor, and the expe­ri­ence was very dis­ap­point­ing, the ini­tial wave might begin with those seated at your table and oth­ers within the restau­rant.  If the expe­ri­ence were bad enough, this wave would quickly spread as you left the restau­rant and told your friends “Don’t Eat At That Place!  Lis­ten is what hap­pened to us!”

Now all of those friends you told about your expe­ri­ence rep­re­sent a new source of wave energy, spread­ing the mes­sage out­ward yet again. God for­bid this is not an iso­lated inci­dent.  In this case, as waves con­tinue to spread and touch con­sumers, the results to a busi­ness are devis­tat­ing.  Imag­ine when you told your friends about the bad expe­ri­ence if they responded “you are the 10^th per­son I have heard from who had a bad expe­ri­ence at that restau­rant.”   Now think about what hap­pens when you get on the web and voice your com­plaint to the world.  Your expe­ri­ence is viewed by oth­ers, Google picks up on a new trend, and the wave con­tin­ues onward…

Pete Black­shaw artic­u­lates this sce­nario bril­liantly in his book, Sat­is­fied Cus­tomers Tell 3 Friends, Angry Cus­tomers Tell 3,000.  He bril­liantly describes the impor­tance of word of mouth in a dig­i­tal age, how to mon­i­tor and par­tic­i­pate in what is being said, and ulti­mately why com­pa­nies need to real­ize the fact that angry cus­tomers can make Tsunami sized waves that can lit­er­ally destroy a business.

Return­ing to Huy­gens, it is imper­a­tive to real­ize that the trans­ac­tion tran­scends the imme­di­ate and present set of cir­cum­stances.  It radi­ates out­ward.  No, los­ing one sale due to poor ser­vice might not crip­ple a busi­ness, but the result­ing wave that this dis­sat­is­fac­tion gen­er­ates might — espe­cially if the event is sys­temic as opposed to an iso­lated inci­dent.  The inter­con­nected world in which we live makes it nearly impos­si­ble to do peo­ple wrong and live very long.

Con­versely, the lit­tle extras that make a cus­tomer expe­ri­ence great might not imme­di­ately trans­late into huge prof­its, but over time, as the waves spread, these dif­fer­ences can cre­ate a rip­ple effect that builds deep cus­tomer loy­alty and last­ing success.

How would you apply Huy­gens’ Prin­ci­ple to Mar­ket­ing?  Please share your thougths by leav­ing a comment.