Majority is Always Wrong

“Marketing” is too broad and too vague a term to be meaningful without a particular framework specified. “Strategic”, “guerilla”, “positioning”, and other military adjectives are commonly used to give the term more precision. I do not quite subscribe to the point of view where customers are placed as a target to be aimed at from across a trench but, nevertheless, let me add to this vocabulary with the “shaped charge marketing”.

You have seen a shaped charge — at least in movies or games — in the form of anti-tank warheads — but you might not understand the physics behind why these weapons are so potent. Below are few interesting facts about it.

Changing the Rules of Combat

Amazingly, a shaped charge — when it explodes next to a tank’s armoured hull — actually moves more mass backward than forward. Targets are hit with only a small fraction of a charge’s mass that is propelled forward and through the armour like a hot knife through butter.

Tiny droplets moving the direction opposite to the object that created waves have a similar nature.

This small mass travels with great velocity, enough as is required for an object to escape Earth’s gravitational field and be launched into space. Meanwhile, most of the charge’s mass (i.e. the slug) goes backwards to balance this momentum in accordance with the Law of the Conservation. Due to this extremely high velocity, metals behave as liquids when met and so the “bullet” simply “falls” through the otherwise impenetrable armour. In summation, shaped charges achieve their effect by forcing a target to behave as though it were in another physical state than that for which it was designed.

In marketing, to hit an especially well-protected target — such as an audience with many preconceived notions — one needs to go in exactly the opposite direction compared to the mainstream and to stick to a smaller agenda/audience which has a chance of gaining momentum.

If you are going to convert someone to a completely different state of mind, you simply need to design a payload capable of blowing away the status quo.