Useful information丨7 technical laws that marketers must know. How can you survive in the marketing circle without knowing these!

Not every marketer needs to be tech-savvy. However, given the close relationship between modern marketing and technology, every marketer should be familiar with these crucial laws of technology, which will also affect your strategy and operations. Here are 7 laws of technology that every marketer should know.

There's also some valuable tech culture knowledge here that you might find useful when chatting with your IT colleagues.

The most famous law to date: hardware performance doubles every two years. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who first predicted the trend in the 1860s. It is incredible that exponential growth in computing power has continued without abating for nearly 50 years. Look at an Osborne computer from 30 years ago next to an iPhone made circa 2009 — the iPhone is 100 times faster and almost 500 times smaller. (Photo by Casey Fleser)

Moore's original prediction was about the number of transistors on an integrated circuit. However, this exponential growth trend has also occurred in other areas: growth in hard drive capacity, increases in network capacity, advances in biotechnology, increases in the pixel count of digital cameras and LCD screens (relative to price), and so on. Futurist Ray Kurzweil has actually generalized this trend and described it as the law of accelerating returns.

Why you need to know

Moore's Law drives the development possibilities of your products and marketing - the important revelation of this law is that the frontier of development possibilities is always expanding rapidly. “If you’re a CEO of a company and you don’t know where these technologies are going, you can go bankrupt in a split second,” Peter Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation, said in a recent interview with VentureBeat. “Or you can use them to leapfrog your competitors.”

An ironic corollary of Moore's Law, Wirth's Law states: Software slows down more dramatically than hardware speeds up or upgrades . In 1995, computer scientist Niklaus Wirth proposed this conclusion in his article "A plea for lean software". It’s also known as Gates’ Law (after Microsoft’s Bill Gates) and Page’s Law (after Google ’s Larry Page), both of whom discovered this dynamic in their own businesses.

That's why the latest version of Microsoft Office runs almost as fast on a new computer as an older version on an older machine. This seeming inversion of Moore's Law is often blamed on "software bloat," caused by endless feature additions, lazy, obscure coding, or poor engineering management. But more broadly, it's just a variation on Parkinson's Law: The workload will continue to expand to fill all available time.

Why you need to know

Note: Expectations brought about by technology are constantly rising. Getting cheaper hardware at a given performance level doesn't cut costs, and many companies will choose to apply the extra performance to meet larger functional needs at the same price - or find a different technology to make the most of the investment . Cloud computing greatly reduces the resistance brought about by this constant "upgrade and replacement" phenomenon. In economics, this is known as the Jevons paradox. Also, remember this product/project management motto: feature requests are always endless, but resources are always limited. Make wise choices.

Brook's Law, a law that has troubled managers for decades, states that adding manpower to a late project will make it longer. This law was humorously summarized by one comment: "Nine women cannot give birth to a child in a month."

Fred Brooks proposed this law in his classic book on software engineering management, The Mythical Man-Month, saying that there are two reasons why this law is universally true:

The experience of Brooks and others eventually led to a new way of developing software - agile methodology. This approach abandons large, fixed work specifications in favor of more flexible, “iterative” implementations, including smaller teams and shorter fixed time windows. Agile teams usually have only 5-9 people, which is to simplify communication and cooperation within the team.

Why you need to know

The marketing industry is moving deeper into the technological arena, developing its own software, especially web and mobile applications, as well as technical configuration and customization of existing platforms, such as marketing automation software. In other words, marketing now involves engineering management, so the profound lessons learned in this area are worth understanding rather than painfully "rediscovering" these laws in blind practice.

Bonus tip: If you’re hiring technical talent, remember another of Brooks’s ever-applicable insights: “good” programmers are 5–10 times more productive than mediocre ones.

Hofstadter's Law has an interesting paradox that is related to Brooks' Law: it always takes longer to do something than you expect, even after you take Hofstadter's Law into account. This is a recursive statement about the difficulty of estimating the time required to complete complex tasks.

Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter articulated this law in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach, affectionately known as "GEB." The self-referential circularity in the definition of this law is also a recurring theme in GEB. This nod to recursion, and witty phrases that use it, is one of the cornerstones of tech culture — like recursive abbreviations.

Note: GEB refers to the initials of the English names of logician Gödel, artist Escher, and composer Bach. This book mainly tells how the creative achievements of the three are intertwined.

Why you need to know

Although Hofstadter's Law is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it does have an important implication: complex outcomes are difficult to accurately predict—and the state of marketing technology is complex enough to apply this law. The solution is to accept unexpected developments and adopt a management approach that can withstand this uncertainty. There are some great examples, such as Agile Marketing, which is based on the principles of Agile software development, and Testing-Based Marketing, an approach that embraces continuous experimental research.

Segal's Law is simple and relevant to anyone involved in measuring marketing performance (which is everyone in the marketing industry): A person with only one watch can tell the time; a person with two watches cannot be sure of the time.

If you’ve ever tried to get the same data using two different web analytics methods, you’ll have a deep respect for this law. In the marketing world, there is so much overlap in data across different systems that getting all the numbers to line up and correspond perfectly can be an endless struggle.

Why you need to know

The world of marketing is filled with metrics and indicators—which is, by and large, a good thing. But it’s important to focus on the meaningful signals and trends these numbers reveal, rather than obsessing over the precision of the margins of error. Tom Davenport, arguably the leading voice in business analytics worldwide, says that “analytics shouldn’t be about math”; it should be about telling stories, making decisions, and finding the courage to stand up for what’s next. ”

To put it another way, the difference between “what time is it” and “what are we going to do productively in the next hour” isn’t that important.

My favorite part of Conway's Law is this: Every piece of software is a reflection of the organizational structure of the team that designed and developed it. This sociological observation, made by Melvin Conway in 1968 and confirmed shortly thereafter by a Harvard Business School study, was not intended to be humorous (although it did inadvertently lampoon the committee’s design).

In fact, I agree with a broader interpretation of this law: software—and other complex systems, like web pages and marketing operations—reflect both the structure and culture of the teams that design and develop them.

That’s why there are so many opportunities for differentiation in innovative products and services, even in a crowded market. For example, when Mint.com launched in 2007, personal finance was already a very mature product category. However, their fresh ideas, intuitive UX design, and simple workflow have won them thousands of users. The massive Intuit tried and failed to emulate their style — ultimately acquiring Mint instead.

Why you need to know

You don't have to worry too much about competitors copying your product through reverse engineering. However, you should pay close attention to the structure and culture of your team — is your marketing department able to inspire and deliver the kinds of innovative products, marketing campaigns, and customer experiences that will blow up the market? I don't mean to belabor the point, but this is yet another good reason to adopt more agile management practices.

This is one of the main reasons I advocate for marketing technologists to be in the marketing department, rather than across the aisle in IT. If the creativity and technical cooperation of the two departments are separated, it will inevitably be reflected in the products manufactured.

Saving the most important for last, Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users connected to it.

Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, originally formulated this law to describe the advantages of having compatible communications devices—such as computer networks, fax machines, and so on—used by more and more people.

This exponential growth in value occurs because the number of ways to pair up a group of N people is equal to (N)(N-1)/2—roughly N squared. Or, to put it more simply, the value of a network grows exponentially. At the very least, making full use of these connections is a matter of human limitations.

With the rise of social media, this law has been frequently cited in social network dynamics, where one of the forces behind it is the so-called "advantage exchange." You use Twitter and Facebook because everyone else is using them. Reed's Law is a variation of this law that specifically addresses the issue of the utility gained from the scale of a social network.

Why you need to know

Because modern marketing is so full of social networks, you'd better have this model in mind - to grow your communities on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as your own private customer network. Find ways for participants to benefit from their connections with each other—not just with you—to harness the powerful exponential power of networks.