The Physics of Marketing: Newton’s Laws of Motion

Comments

1. Sean Bacon says:
   April 11, 2008 at 8:06 am

   First I will address the Law of Iner­tia, Newton’s first law. My imme­di­ate reac­tion was that this con­cept fails mar­ket­ing because even with no “exter­nal force” (com­pe­ti­tion) any given mar­ket­ing con­cept or cam­paign still has a vari­able life cycle and thus its effec­tive­ness must end. Giv­ing it a sec­ond thought, I real­ized that time itself could be that out­side deter­min­ing fac­tor tak­ing it even fur­ther: over expo­sure to the mes­sage, changes in mar­ket cli­mate, and the devel­op­ment of new tech­nol­ogy are all forces fight­ing against the life span of a mar­ket­ing cam­paign. Per­haps if the cam­paign lived in a vac­uum it could stand the test of time and still be as effec­tive 300 years from now, but that’s all theoretical.

   Build­ing on that, but mov­ing on to Newton’s sec­ond law, if you think of the veloc­ity of a mar­ket­ing cam­paign as being its over­all effec­tive­ness then, I agree. The sec­ond is Newton’s most finite prin­ci­ple since it incor­po­rates quan­ti­ta­tive cal­cu­la­tions: Force = Mass x Accel­er­a­tion is cer­tainly applic­a­ble to a cam­paign. Force being the per­me­ation of the thought processes of the tar­get audi­ence, Mass being the mes­sage in its var­i­ous forms, and accel­er­a­tion being the fre­quency of expo­sure. This lends to one of the prin­ci­ples of Guerilla Mar­ket­ing – A mes­sage must be heard nine times before it has con­vinced its per­ceiver of its pur­pose, how­ever; two out of every three times they are exposed to it they don’t allow it to sink in. There­fore, any given con­sumer must be in the pres­ence of a mes­sage being pre­sented 27 times before they are will­ing to accept it.

   There are sev­eral ways that you could draw a com­par­i­son between mar­ket­ing and Newton’s Third Law, the way that I am going to focus on works in favor of mar­ket­ing. Look at it in terms of a bowl­ing ball dropped on a wooden floor (the action). Since bowl­ing balls don’t bounce very well, in addi­tion to what I’m sure is a rather sat­is­fy­ing “thud” at the end of its jour­ney, the bowl­ing ball will cre­ate a shock wave mov­ing away from it in all direc­tions (the oppo­site reac­tion). This is the case in mar­ket­ing as well. The bowl­ing ball is your mes­sage; the wooden floor is your consumer/perceiver. Once the sat­is­fy­ing thud has taken place, if your cam­paign is done right the con­sumer will be excited and wish to share the mes­sage with those around him, thus cre­at­ing the shock­wave effect and another source of expo­sure to your message.

   Great project David, who would have thought that the “sci­ence of cre­ativ­i­ty” could be so much fun!

   Keep up the fan­tas­tic work.
2. DAVIDeBOWMAN says:
   April 11, 2008 at 8:20 am

   Now that is what I am talk­ing about… Great com­ment Sean.
3. DAVIDeBOWMAN says:
   April 12, 2008 at 8:02 pm

   Here is my first take on this, and I am going to talk a bit about change man­age­ment. Because what an orga­ni­za­tion does, not what it says, is true mar­ket­ing, this should be applicable.

   Newton’s First Law: “Bod­ies move in a straight line with a uni­form speed, or remain sta­tion­ary, unless a force acts to change their speed or direc­tion.” How often does an orga­ni­za­tion enjoy suc­cess and then just coast? Every day. The focus shifts from chang­ing the world to main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo — from risk tak­ing to risk man­age­ment. It is the death of so many great com­pa­nies, and yet you see it again and again. Com­pa­nies con­tinue to move on in a straight line, with no one tak­ing risks or action to change, more specif­i­cally, to accel­er­ate that speed. Clas­sic big business.

   Newton’s Sec­ond Law: Forces pro­duce accel­er­a­tions that are in pro­por­tion to the mass of a body. (F = ma)
   So big busi­ness gets going, enjoys suc­cess, chooses a direc­tion. Things are going well for a time, until… some­thing comes along and now it is time to change direc­tion. Mov­ing a big busi­ness takes a heck of a lot of effort. It could be years from the time that the prob­lem is rec­og­nized until the course is actu­ally shifted. If a firm is lucky that course will have been tem­porar­ily cor­rected, but it may be that the world has moved ahead too far. And thus a firm will be set on a course — some­times quickly — for destruc­tion. It is dif­fi­cult to turn an Air­craft car­rier — although when pointed in the right direc­tion it is basi­cally impos­si­ble to stop. Good small busi­nesses enjoy the advan­tage of being nim­ble. Agility can be a really good thing when it is time to change direction.

   Newton’s Third Law: “Every action of a force pro­duces an equal and oppo­site reac­tion“
   Inno­va­tion does not last for­ever. What if Apple had stopped with the first gen­er­a­tion of iPod’s Would iTunes be what it is today? Would the iPhone have had the abil­ity to take off? Of course not. Apple has been wise enough to assume that for every amaz­ing gad­get it intro­duces, it will spawn count­less other inno­va­tions — from its com­pe­ti­tion. Apple has man­aged to stay ahead of the game by rec­og­niz­ing that for every nano they intro­duce — a Zune will be soon to fol­low. Now I know I am a lit­tle off here, but let me elab­o­rate a lit­tle more. Again, how often do com­pa­nies come up with that great idea, bring it to mar­ket, have suc­cess, and then quickly dis­ap­pear as com­pe­ti­tion catches and kills them. For every action a reac­tion. Be pre­pared. Mike Tyson — another great physi­cist — used to have a great quote. He once wisely stated “Every­one has a plan, until they get hit.” When you act, be ready for some­one else to equally react. Antic­i­pate that reac­tion, and pre­pare. This again is much eas­ier, and prob­a­bly much more impor­tant for small busi­ness. Big Busi­ness can afford to take a few shots here and there with­out col­laps­ing. Small busi­ness can’t. If your com­pe­ti­tion is load­ing up a Mike Tyson upper­cut, you can’t afford to be Michael Spinks — lights out.

   Yes, I know I man­gled New­ton a lit­tle, but I am count­ing on oth­ers to con­tinue the dis­cus­sion. You know… action… reaction…
4. Tim Bailey says:
   April 13, 2008 at 6:20 pm

   David,

   This is a won­der­ful project!

   I have truly enjoyed every­one “weigh­ing in”(if you’ll par­don yet another box­ing pun) with their opin­ions and mus­ings. There is no bet­ter cat­a­lyst to inno­va­tion than col­lect­ing thoughts between bril­liant and cre­ative individuals.

   I would like to take a brief stab at the sec­ond prin­ci­ple, deal­ing with Newton’s Sec­ond Law. F=ma is one of the more mem­o­rable for­mu­las I recall from Mr. Drabina’s 10^th Grade fifth period Physics class. The basic premise lies in the idea that a bb rolling down a hill is not as scary as a boul­der rolling down that same hill. They are both accel­er­at­ing, but you tend to get out of the boulder’s way due to its mass — know­ing that the force of it will crush you while the bb will just roll through the waf­fle pat­tern on the sole of your Doc Martens.

   Tak­ing this prin­ci­ple into the world of mar­ket­ing, the actions of larger enter­prises tend to have a much larger impact on the mar­ket than the actions of the cor­ner store. I guess what I am try­ing to say is that the cor­ner store would have to get so much buzz(acceleration) cre­ated around a cam­paign to give it the force to over­come and influ­ence the behav­ior of the aver­age con­sumer because ‘Joe’s Cor­ner Store’ doesn’t have a mil­lionth the mass of a Wal­Mart or other large retailers.

   I enjoyed the com­ment about the agility of a small busi­ness, and the rel­a­tively smaller mass of the small busi­ness allows it to stay on its toes and cre­ate a cam­paign that may just gain the accel­er­a­tion to move the large player and cdhange the sta­tus quo. Remem­ber, David slung a rel­a­tively tiny rock to knock Goliath down.

   I hope that my ram­blings have a made a con­tri­bu­tion to to both the worlds of sci­ence and mar­ket­ing. Keep up the good work David Bowman!
5. Chad says:
   April 16, 2008 at 12:44 pm

   Good anal­ogy Tim,

   I think what you are try­ing to describe here is the impor­tance of energy, in par­tic­u­lar, kinetic energy (KE=1/2 * mass * velocity^2). A large veloc­ity has very lit­tle kinetic energy with­out mass. Like­wise, a large mass has very lit­tle kinetic energy with­out veloc­ity. That large boul­der mov­ing at 1 mph is prob­a­bly less of a threat than the BB mov­ing at 600mph. Both veloc­ity and mass are impor­tant in describ­ing the energy of an object.

   I would also like to pro­pose the con­cept of poten­tial energy here. PE=m*g*h where m=mass, g=acceleration due to grav­ity, and h=height of an object. If kinetic energy is syn­ony­mous with “prod­uct suc­cess” we would want to build suf­fi­cient poten­tial energy before releas­ing it. Once the object is released, poten­tial energy is con­verted to kinetic energy. Think of a Hot Wheels track. You put the car on top of the track and it ini­tially has zero veloc­ity and there­fore zero kinetic energy. How­ever, it does have poten­tial energy. When you release the car, it trav­els to the bot­tom of the track and now has veloc­ity. The poten­tial energy was con­verted to kinetic energy.

   Keep­ing with the Hot Wheels car theme, once the car is at the bot­tom of the track it could con­tinue on for­ever at that same veloc­ity if it had no fric­tion. But fric­tion is our prob­lem here and I think that is applic­a­ble to many busi­ness con­cepts. Fric­tion con­verts that energy into heat and since the mass of the car has not changed, that energy loss results in reduced veloc­ity. Sean Bacon touched on this in his first post.

   So in the busi­ness world, how do we iden­tify the sources of fric­tion and what can be done to min­i­mize it? There will always be fric­tion since we do not live in a vac­uum. If we want to main­tain kinetic energy, we have to con­tin­u­ally sup­ply enough energy to over­come fric­tion or our object will come to rest like Sean sug­gested. Per­haps this can be achieved by adding more poten­tial energy?

   I think the poten­tial energy is where mar­ket­ing come into play. Look­ing at the above equa­tion for poten­tial energy (PE=m*g*h). The mar­keter is try­ing to take a prod­uct (m) with a cer­tain sup­ply (h) and increase its demand (g).

   That’s one engineer’s brief per­spec­tive any­way…. per­haps grossly over sim­pli­fied until we work up to the analo­gies of oscil­la­tors and chaotic attrac­tors. Hey, I never thought I would like talk­ing about marketing!

   Regards,
   Chad
6. Kristy Carlson says:
   December 1, 2008 at 7:21 pm

   How would you dis­cuss Newton’s laws in motion in regards to sports though

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