What physics can teach us about marketing

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_cobley_what_physics_taught_me_about_marketing.html

For my first review I have chosen a video talk with Dan Cobley, who is a marketing director in Google. His duty is to connect customers and businesses, helping to satisfy their needs. Before Google, Mr. Cobley was the vice president of branding and marketing for Capital One and the marketing director of Ask Jeeves. He has worked in both the UK and US, but always in marketing although his first degree from Oxford is in physics.

In his speech, Dan explains what physics taught him about marketing. He gives examples of the main physical laws and transfers his knowledge from physics to marketing.

It took me 4 times to watch the video, because at first I couldn’t make head or tail of Dan’s speech, especially when he was describing the connection between formulas and marketing rules. However, Mr. Cobley’s speech is coherent, persuasive, articulate and engaging.

I’ll try to put some of Dan’s key points in a nutshell:

Newton’s Law: For a larger particle of larger mass requires more force to change its direction. It’s the same with brands: the bigger the brand, the more force is needed to change its positioning.

Example: This rule explains why companies like Uniliver and P&G keep brands like Oreo, Arial and Pringles and Dove separate rather than having one giant parent brand.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: You can never accurately and exactly measure the particle, because observation changes it.
The message for marketing is that try to measure what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they’ll do, or anticipate they’ll do.

Example: Think about of the group of moms who are talking about their wonderful children and mentioning that almost none of them buy junk food. And yet, McDonalds sells hundreds of millions of burgers every year.

The fundamental axiom of physics: you can’t prove a hypothesis through observation, it’s easier to disprove it.

As to marketing: no matter how much is invested in your brand, one bad week can undermine decades of good work.

Example: physics: Ptolemy had dozens of data points to support his theory the planets rotate around the Earth. However, it took only one robust observation from Copernicus to blow that idea out of the water.

Marketing: BP. They have spent millions of pounds over many years building up its credibility as an environmentally friendly brand, but then one little accident happened…

The second law of thermodynamics: Entropy will always increase.

Message for marketing: your brand is more dispersed than you suppose.

 Example: If we go back to 20 years the one message was pretty much controlled by one marketing manager. But today things have changed. You can get a strong brand image or a message and put it out, but then you will lose control of it. Your brand gets more chaotic.

From my point of view, Dan’s speech is very informative. I guessed that all of the sciences were related together, but I didn’t imagine such a close connection between physics and marketing. The rules that Dan mentioned above could also be very useful when we talk about international marketing. We should take them into consideration while doing a market research not only on the domestic market but on the worldwide one, too.