Brands, the Universe, and Everything

by Tamsen | April 1st, 2010

Falling apple

We’d like to think that we, and the brands we create and represent, are somehow exempt from the laws of the universe.

We’re not.

Brands, whether organizational, product, or personal, are as much a product of gravity as Newton’s apocryphal apple.

The Law of Brand Gravity

Every object in the universe attracts every other object in the universe with a force that’s proportional to their mass: the greater the mass, the greater the pull. When objects are of similar size (volume), their pull is determined by the density of their mass.

The distance between two objects has an inverse relationship: the smaller the distance, the greater the pull.

In branding, bigger brands (think Coke or Harley-Davidson, or even the Red Cross or Harvard) have a significant amount of “brand mass” based largely on their size. They’re huge, ergo they exert a lot of pull. The people closest to them—say, the die-hard Harley fans, third-generation Harvard alumni—feel a bond, usually in the form of loyalty, that only the strongest of external forces could break.

For personal brands, think of celebrities (entertainment, political, social media, or otherwise). There, it’s the scope and scale of fame that creates mass. The more well-known someone is, the more well-established their career and (hopefully) their fame, the wider the appeal they have to the world at large, and to their fans.

But what if your brand isn’t Apple-big, or you’re not Tom Cruise-famous? How can you take advantage of Brand Gravity?

By understanding the power of Social Density.

The Theory of Social Density

My high school days may seem a bit unrelated here, but bear with me (they were, after all, where I developed my love of physics). Back then, my friend Len Shropshire proposed his Theory of Social Density as a way to explain and understand the omnipresent social cliques and inevitable popularity shifts.

Quite simply, he said, some people had more “social density” than others, and thus exerted a greater social-gravitational pull.

Think about it: you can spot socially dense people from across a room. They’re the centers of attention, the ones people naturally, well…gravitate towards.

You can certainly see this in social media (indeed, not only did Julien Smith recently observe the “orbital” nature of social media stars, planets, and moons, but Trust Agents, his New York Times Best-selling book with Chris Brogan, is a virtual textbook on increasing social density).

The same theory applies to brands as well. The brands with greater density exert a greater pull on their fans, and on the marketplace.

Like people with high social density, you can easily spot brands with high brand density. Not only do they have a galaxy of devoted fans surrounding them, but their pull affects the course of similar and competitor brands around them (think of how an innovation by Apple or Google has a ripple effect through their industries).

The Brand Boson

But where does “brand mass” come from?

In physics, that question is answered by the still-hypothetical existence of the Higgs Boson, a particle, scientists theorize, that gives all others their mass. No one’s ever seen it…but we do see the effects we think it explains.

In branding, you can’t see the unique, irreducible core that gives rise to your brand’s total mass, either, but we can define it—your brand’s core purpose, its unique brand foundation—and the properties it holds.

Like the Higgs Boson, our “Brand Bosons” have visible effects as well. We see it in the coherence of our visual systems, the clarity and resonance of our brand messages, and in the scope, scale, and strength of customer loyalty.

Building brand mass (and thus our brand’s gravitational pull), then, is a combination of understanding what it is that gives rise to our brand in the first place and of actively pursuing ways to increase its density (a process we here at Sametz call social branding).

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So the next time you’re trying to understand brands, the universe, and everything? Look no further than the apple (or Apple!) in your hand.

Categories Branding, Strategy and Management