Newton's Laws of Motion

These basic laws of physics can help you kick your marketing strategy into the next gear. You need the "big mo" which is, of course, momentum.

by Brock Henderson Principal, Henderson & Associates [December 14, 2006]

It constantly surprises me how technologically savvy individuals in the industry completely ignore Newton's Laws of Motion. These three simple laws apply to the basics of marketing just as easily as they do to physics. Spend a minute with me and I'll show you just how relevant Newton's Laws are to marketing.

Newton's First Law: Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Sales will stay in a constant state, (which includes zero, or near zero sales), until you do something such as increase your marketing effort—or really seriously mess up your product or service. I am constantly amazed that so many in this industry don't understand this simple principal; to increase sales you need to take action and do some marketing.

Newton's Second Law: The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma.

Acceleration and force are vectors (as indicated by their symbols being displayed in italic bold font); in this law, the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector.

The force of your marketing is equal to the size of your marketing budget and the frequency of your advertising. A large budget in and of itself is not enough; you must continue to apply that budget month after month. In fact, a small budget consistently applied month after month will generate more momentum over time than a large budget applied just once or twice a year.

Consistently applying a little effort will produce more sales than an occasional burst of effort. (This gets us into the Laws of Energy and Momentum, which is a separate discussion.)

Newton's Third Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

In marketing, this simply means that when you advertise you will get an increase in recognition, not necessarily in sales. A single marketing act does not mean you will get the phone ringing off the hook, it does mean that your presence in the marketplace will increase. It will take multiple acts of advertising/marketing to get sales to actually increase.

Too many people seem to think that if you run an ad, you will instantly get results, and that is fiction. Running an ad one time "Just to see how it does" will result in a major disappointment because people need to see your name multiple times before taking any action. This solitary action is not enough to create a large enough reaction to be noticed in sales. (I remind you of Newton's Second Law, as well as the concept of momentum.)

Also, this one-shot-ad approach ignores the fact that the prospect may not be interested in your services that particular day, but next week could be a different story. And don't think they will remember you next week after just seeing your ad one time … they won't. If that were true, then McDonalds wouldn't have to constantly keep advertising, nor would coke, or all the attorneys I see on the television day after day.

Conversely, if you don't advertise or market in some way, you won't obtain any increase in sales. While this seems obvious to me, there are many out there that refuse to market themselves because "everyone knows who we are"; but knowing you exist, is completely different from understanding why they should use your service.

Now I hope you will take Newton's Laws and apply them to your marketing effort. Start slow if you want, but give it time and let it grow; after a little bit you will see the results.

—End