The effect of entropy on marketing

Entropy, or chaos, always increases. Everything is moving from an ordered state to a more chaotic, less ordered state.

There are two simple examples of this, firstly my kitchen. I tidy the kitchen every few days, put things in the right places, neaten up the shelves, remove, or file papers and letters. I put the kitchen in an ordered state. Then, as my children invade, as people come and go the room gets less and less ordered, entropy takes over. Mugs go out of alignment, things become confused.

The second example is a sand castle. When you build a sandcastle you put all of the elements into a structured form. You take thousands of tiny grains of sand and form them into a recognisable shape. If you then leave it, sit and watch, slowly the structure collapses. The wind pulls away corners, gravity drags grains down, water washes over. And in the end, you are left with a pile of sand. The sand moves from an ordered state to a disordered state, everything in the universe is slowly getting more and more disordered.

Your marketing plans, your tactics, your internal teams and departments are just like that.

Put a plan in place and leave it alone. At the beginning of the plan everyone is facing the same direction, everyone is organised, everyone is doing what they should do. Leave it for a week, or two, and someone will be going off plan, not by much perhaps, but off plan. Chaos will have started to encroach on your plans.

Leave your department, go on holiday, and you can guarantee that by the time you get back, things will have changed, chaos will have started to encroach

You most finely crafted marketing campaign will start to go off track, will start to veer away from its objectives, go off message, the longer it goes on.

Entropy always increases.

mcm2 –  digital marketing agncy based in Cheshire and the North West