Dan Cobley: What Physics teaches about marketing
Ian Lurie Apr 22 2011
I don’t think I’ve embedded a video by someone else on this blog in 5 years.
However, this piece about marketing and physics is beyond brilliant: It defines marketing in a way that totally, completely makes sense. It’s only 7 minutes long. Watch it.
Ian Lurie
CEO
Ian Lurie is CEO and founder of Portent Inc. He's recorded training for Lynda.com, writes regularly for the Portent Blog and has been published on AllThingsD, Forbes.com and TechCrunch. Ian speaks at conferences around the world, including SearchLove, MozCon, SIC and ad:Tech. Follow him on Twitter at portentint. He also just published a book about strategy for services businesses: One Trick Ponies Get Shot, available on Kindle. Read More
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Physics studies matter and energy, spanning many orders of magnitude of space and time, using fundamental mathematical models, so it’s not surprising that some of its approaches and findings would be applicable in other fields.
Applying thermodynamics to marketing can also be found in the ‘HendroDynamics’ model of brand switching (PDF) which has been around since the 1970s.
A decade ago, Barabasi and Bianconi essentially copied the statistical mechanics of Bose gases to study the growth of the Web, using the same equations and even preserving the notation. (My own PhD research was in gas adsorption, so it was a pleasant surprise to see familiar equations reused for a new purpose.)
Even Brin and Page’s original PageRank calculation itself approximates the solution of a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation.
It was an interesting video, but a bit surprising that he didn’t mention any of these.