43. What Marketers can learn from Physics?
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This week’s newsletter is inspired by a wonderful TED talk, ‘What physics taught me about marketing,’ by Dan Cobley, an ex-marketing director at Google.
He speaks about a few surprising similarities between the two seemingly unrelated disciplines, but here are the ones I loved the most:
Newton’s second law states that acceleration equals force divided by mass, meaning bigger objects require more force to change direction. This idea is relevant in marketing because smaller brands can adapt more quickly, while bigger brands need more effort to shift their market positioning. This is why companies like Unilever and P&G keep their sub-brands separate rather than relying on a single parent brand—it allows for greater agility.
Another example is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which suggests observing something changes it. For example, in market research, people may not give honest answers, such as admitting they only brush their teeth once a day in a survey about toothbrushes. This is where analytics becomes crucial for understanding actual consumer behavior.
One of my favorite marketers on LinkedIn, Scott Brinker, also discusses a similarly interesting idea in Marketing Metrics & Quantum Physics. He takes the concept of structural realism, the idea that the universe is not about individual things but rather the relationships between those things. This perspective is relevant in marketing analytics, where instead of myopically focussing on one metric, it’s better to understand the relationships and changes between them over time.
Finally, I asked ChatGPT the same question—What can marketers learn from Physics? Among the many responses, one that resonated with me was the lesson from Chaos Theory: Small Changes Can Have Big Impacts. In a marketing context, minor tweaks in messaging, timing, or targeting can have outsized effects on campaign performance. Marketers need to constantly test these variables to identify a business’s growth levers.