The Physics of Marketing

The Physics of Mar­ket­ing is a new project that I am launch­ing. I don’t under­stand Physics. I have never taken a for­mal class on the sub­ject, and my expo­sure to Physics has been lim­ited. How­ever, I find Physics to be fas­ci­nat­ing. Some­thing I do know a lit­tle about, though some days I ques­tion that too, is mar­ket­ing. So here is the idea. I hope to gain a greater under­stand­ing of Physics, by ask­ing the world to describe con­cepts from the dis­ci­pline in analo­gies that would per­tain to Mar­ket­ing. I hope that this will gen­er­ate a fair amount of dis­cus­sion and debate, and ulti­mately I will come to learn more about both physics and marketing.

This project was inspired by two books.

1. Cre­ativ­ity by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi — an amaz­ing book about what it means to be cre­ative and how to cul­ti­vate cre­ativ­ity in every aspect of life.

2. 50 Physics Ideas You Really Need to Know by Joanne Baker. Not being a Physi­cist, I don’t know how good this one is. I do know that it lists 50 Physics ideas, (see the title) and offers a con­cise, easy to under­stand, expla­na­tion of each. I found this at the Bor­ders out­let for 3 dol­lars and could not resist.

Ide­ally the project will work like this. Each week, I will place a con­cept from the world of physics up for dis­cus­sion. I will offer my mod­est, and prob­a­bly flawed expla­na­tion of the prin­ci­ple, and then I will ask the world to help me under­stand how this could be applied to Mar­ket­ing. I am hop­ing that peo­ple will decide to play along and we can all learn and have a laugh with this. I have a few engi­neers in my fam­ily, and hope that will decide to chime it, as they are uber smart, funny, and fre­quently dis­cuss things like this when together around hol­i­days and spe­cial occa­sions. The dis­cus­sion always ends up some­where on physics, and I am stuck try­ing to piece together what they are talk­ing about by lis­ten­ing for con­tex­tual clues. Per­haps by next Christ­mas, I will know what the heck they are talk­ing about, and can par­tic­i­pate in the dis­cus­sion. Worst case, I will strengthen a glar­ing weak­ness in my Triv­ial Pur­suit game.

So world, I invite you to play along and teach me, and every­one else who reads this site, a lit­tle some­thing about sci­ence. Fol­low the advice of the renowned musi­cal sci­en­tists the Beastie Boys, and drop some sci­ence knowl­edge on me “like Galileo dropped the orange.” It’s the sound of science.

Week 1 — Mach’s Prin­ci­ple
Week 2 — Newton’s Laws of Motion
Week 3 — Kepler’s Laws