After reading the title of this video, I had to check it out.
What Physics Taught Me About Marketing,
a TED Talks production teaches how we can relate defined laws of physics to marketing
tactics. For those of you out there who have a background in physics, I promise
you will find this interesting. Here is why:
The Science:
Dan Cobley begins his talk with this relation, Force= Mass x Acceleration,
or in other words, Acceleration= Force/Mass, meaning the larger the mass the
more force it requires to change its direction. When it comes to brands,
changing the image or reputation of a one massive brand is much harder to do
than then changing them for smaller brands. For example, General Mills owns
brands such as Betty Crocker, Old El Paso, and Green Giant rather than labeling
them all simply General Mills. It is easier to change say, Betty Crocker is
baked goods, Green Giant are vegetable products in contracts to saying General
Mills produces baked goods and vegetables. This can cause confusion in the bulk
eye of what General Mills quality is, in their snack food or their healthy
foods. Much like walking on thin ice, which makes for a good metaphor in
itself, in marketing when we spread our body weight out creaking more surface
area, it’s easier to keep the ice from breaking out from under us. Thus, it is
better idea to create “new brands for new ventures” instead of trying to change
the image of an already positioned brand.
My Two Cents:
Let’s use this advice to remind us to break up things a bit.
If you want to own contrasting businesses or simply businesses that don’t have
the same types of goods or services, create new brands. I know an entrepreneur who
does pest control and also sells a multi-use, organic agent that kills bugs. He
uses different names for differentiate his pest control service, and his
organic produce. Does he use his own product when spraying customer’s homes for
bugs? You’d be crazy if you thought that he didn’t. I can very well use other
products if requested by a customer, but by using his own product he can piggy
back his marketing by showing customers how good it works at their homes, then
turn around and see his products being bought from the stores he sells his
products in.
The Science:
Cobley continues with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In
short, it is impossible to measure the movement of a particle because the acts
of measuring it will changes it. The marketing application of this principle is
that consumers will change their behavior (or portray unrealistic behavior)
when they know they are being monitored. The best example he gives is, if
asking about people who regularly look at pornography on the web in a survey
the numbers would be very few, yet we know from Google that it is the number
one searched topic in the web. The goal here is to use all your resources to
measure what customers are actually doing before you ask them what they will
do.
My Two Cents:
The first thought in my mind of an example of this is home
gyms. My parents growing up always preferred to exercise in our home. They
always said, “I don’t like having to get ready, and then drive to the gym to
get my workout done. I would never go, but if I had the equipment at the house,
I would be motived when I saw it to work out all the time.” This was never the
case. I sure there are many of you out there who have exercise equipment in
your home and that equipment has more dust on it than you care to clean off.
With all the right intentions, my parents said they would exercise more because
it was convenient, yet the actual evidence of that suggests otherwise.
The Science:
Next, Cobley explains the Scientific Method. This means you cannot
probe a hypothesis thought observation you can only disprove it and it only
takes on contradictory point to disprove the entire hypothesis. As a person
finds more and more points to support the hypothesis, it can never be proven to
be true, yet only one point against it can prove it to be false. The examples
that are given are companies such as BP claiming they are an earth friendly oil
company, then for years they hold true to that claim until the massive oil
spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Another brand that is used as an example
is Toyota, revered to be the most reliable of cares till a mass product recall
proved this reputation to be inaccurate. In marketing each of these brands
there was many years of successful branding of they own claims but in the end
it only took one event to break their foundation.
My Two Cents:
I believe that this method can be applied to any organization
throughout the world. We are all humans and in being such we are all susceptible
to screwing up in some point of our lives. But I believe that when marketing
your business especially a new business venture, it is vital that we leave the
inner children in us behind and put on our big-boy pants. We need to leave
behind the dishonesty, the lack of work ethic, the selfishness, the things that
will inevitably disprove our business from the business we want painted on a
billboard. We need to prove our integrity, our hard work ethic, taking care of
our customers with positive unexpected experiences and then stand by those
traits even when times get rough, and in the end our business will be one that
remains intact.
The Science:
Lastly Entropy, being defined as the measure of disorder will
always increase. In this section of the talk Cobley gives the example of a political
poster that was used for a campaign, as he moves through the slides of the
poster it is obvious that someone has changed the words on the poster, or the
photograph of the candidate to look and say comical things. In turn he says,
this is good thing, get in with the public by letting them have fun with what
was originally an important ad. It gives off a better sense of a personable company;
it gets your name in to more places that a marketing team wouldn’t necessarily
have got in. The key is to not fight it, but embrace it and find a way to work
with it.
My Two Cents:
With social media being how it is today, I’m sure we have
always many variations of the same pictures time and time again. I can
personally say from experience that there have been times where I have seen a
picture of a person with something comedic about a topic written on it. Me not
knowing what the text was referring to, I would look it up to try to make sense
of the punchline, as a result I will have come across what the picture was originally
intended for. Maybe I’m the only one who takes the time to do that…but I want
to say that I highly doubt it. This just proves Cobley’s point. As a company it
is your job to find a way to embrace the public made twist in your marketing
plan and roll with the punches. I was told as a kid, if the kids on the playground
are making fun of your for something, if you don’t let it get to you and even
start laughing with them, they will not be able to insult you but will begin to
laugh with your rather than at you.
This is a great video for those who learn better with
visuals. By Dan Cobley breaking it down and tying these points in with the
concepts of physics, it better helps us learn and retain the information.
I hope you got as much out of it as I did. Let us know what
you think, BRE Marketing wants to hear from you. Share your thoughts in the
comments below and like it on Facebook.
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