This is Mabel.
Mabel is an aphid, a small insect in the same order as cicadas, stink bugs, and bed bugs.
All these bugs pierce their prey and suck out vital fluids.
Aphids’ prey are plants.
And what aphids are after is buried within the plant, flowing in tubes made from single cells strung end-to-end.
These are called sieve tubes and together they form the plumbing system for a plant’s most valuable resource: sap.
Sap is mostly water and sugar.
Some species’ sap has as much sugar per liter as a can of soda.
Photosynthesis is constantly producing sugar.
You can think of it as a chemical “pump” which generates incredibly high pressure— up to 9 times that of a car tire— in the sieve tubes.
To feed, Mabel uses her stylet, which is a long, flexible needle.
She slowly worms it into the tissue, between the plant’s cells, until she pierces one of those sieve tubes.
Because the sap is under so much pressure, Mabel doesn’t even have to suck it out of the plant.
She just opens a valve in her head and lets the pressure push the sap through her digestive system.
We’ll come back to what comes out of her butt, but for now, you should know that plants don’t want to be punctured and sipped.
So they try to defend themselves.
One defense is the sap itself.
To see how that works, let’s hypothetically hook up some other insect’s digestive tract to a steady stream of sap.
When that sap touches the insect’s cells, its high sugar content encourages the water in the cells to come out by osmosis… exactly like salt encourages water to come out of a slug.
The more sap that passes through the insect, the more water it loses.
Eventually, it shrivels up and dies.
Mabel’s gut, however, is packed with an enzyme called sucrase, which takes two molecules of sucrose and converts them into one molecule of fructose and one of… this three-unit sugar.
Mabel burns the fructose for energy, leaving the three-unit-sugar behind.
Now, how does that help her?
The more molecules of sugar that are dissolved in the sap, the more water it can suck out of Mabel’s cells.
By reducing the number of molecules of sugar in the sap, Mabel reduces its ability to suck water out of her cells.
Plant sap neutralized.
Now that means Mabel can feed for days, getting all the energy she needs to reproduce.
Some aphid species have an incredible life cycle.
For example, the green peach aphid.
During the fall, males and females mate, and the females lay eggs.
But in the spring, when the eggs hatch, all the nymphs that emerge are female.
When those females reach maturity, they don’t lay eggs.
Instead, they give birth to live young… that are clones of themselves… and already pregnant… with their own clones.
So, these female aphids have two generations of baby aphid clones forming inside themselves at the same time.
Scientists call this telescopic development.
That means that aphids can make more of themselves fast— there can be 20 generations within a single season— and that means lots of aphid poop.
Mabel can poop her entire body weight every two hours, making her one of the most prolific poopers on the planet.
Some aphid populations can produce hundreds of kilograms of poop per acre.
Now, aphid poop is not like your poop.
Chemically, it’s not all that different from sap; it’s a clear and colorless sweet, syrupy liquid.
You might already know it by a different name: honeydew.
Other species love honeydew.
Some species of ants love it so much they sort of herd and defend entire aphid colonies.
In return, the ants get a steady supply of sweet honeydew, which they can drink directly from the aphids’ butts.
Bottom’s up!
Humans love honeydew, too.
Several Native American tribes used to harvest it from tall reeds and make it into cake.
And some species of bee make honey from honeydew, which humans then harvest and eat.
So plants make the sap, which is eaten and pooped out by aphids, regurgitated by bees, harvested by humans, and dolloped into a cup of Earl Grey tea.
Have you ever wondered what happens to a painkiller, like ibuprofen, after you swallow it?
Medicine that slides down your throat can help treat a headache, a sore back, or a throbbing sprained ankle.
But how does it get where it needs to go in the first place?
The answer is that it hitches a ride in your circulatory blood stream, cycling through your body in a race to do its job before it's snared by organs and molecules designed to neutralize and expel foreign substances.
This process starts in your digestive system.
Say you swallow an ibuprofen tablet for a sore ankle.
Within minutes, the tablet starts disintegrating in the acidic fluids of your stomach.
The dissolved ibuprofen travels into the small intestine and then across the intestinal wall into a network of blood vessels.
These blood vessels feed into a vein, which carries the blood, and anything in it, to the liver.
The next step is to make it through the liver.
As the blood and the drug molecules in it travel through liver blood vessels, enzymes attempt to react with the ibuprofen molecules to neutralize them.
The damaged ibuprofen molecules, called metabolites, may no longer be effective as painkillers.
At this stage, most of the ibuprofen makes it through the liver unscathed.
It continues its journey out of the liver, through veins, into the body's circulatory system.
Half an hour after you swallow the pill, some of the dose has already made it into the circulatory blood stream.
This blood loop travels through every limb and organ, including the heart, brain, kidneys, and back through the liver.
When ibuprofen molecules encounter a location where the body's pain response is in full swing, they bind to specific target molecules that are a part of that reaction.
Painkillers, like ibuprofen, block the production of compounds that help the body transmit pain signals.
As more drug molecules accumulate, the pain-cancelling affect increases, reaching a maximum within about one or two hours.
Then the body starts efficiently eliminating ibuprofen, with the blood dose decreasing by half every two hours on average.
When the ibuprofen molecules detach from their targets, the systemic blood stream carries them away again.
Back in the liver, another small fraction of the total amount of the drug gets transformed into metabolites, which are eventually filtered out by the kidneys in the urine.
The loop from liver to body to kidneys continues at a rate of about one blood cycle per minute, with a little more of the drug neutralized and filtered out in each cycle.
These basic steps are the same for any drug that you take orally, but the speed of the process and the amount of medicine that makes it into your blood stream varies based on drug, person, and how it gets into the body.
The dosing instructions on medicine labels can help, but they're averages based on a sample population that doesn't represent every consumer.
And getting the dose right is important.
If it's too low, the medicine won't do its job.
If it's too high, the drug and its metabolites can be toxic.
That's true of any drug.
One of the hardest groups of patients to get the right dosage for are children.
That's because how they process medicine changes quickly, as do their bodies.
For instance, the level of liver enzymes that neutralize medication highly fluctuates during infancy and childhood.
And that's just one of many complicating factors.
Genetics, age, diet, disease, and even pregnancy influence the body's efficiency of processing medicine.
Some day, routine DNA tests may be able to dial in the precise dose of medicine personalized to your liver efficiency and other factors, but in the meantime, your best bet is reading the label or consulting your doctor or pharmacist, and taking the recommended amounts with the recommended timing.
So I work in marketing, which I love, but my first passion was physics, a passion brought to me by a wonderful school teacher, when I had a little less gray hair.
So he taught me that physics is cool because it teaches us so much about the world around us.
And I'm going to spend the next few minutes trying to convince you that physics can teach us something about marketing.
So quick show of hands -- who studied some marketing in university?
Who studied some physics in university?
Pretty good.
And at school?
Okay, lots of you.
So, hopefully this will bring back some happy, or possibly some slightly disturbing memories.
So, physics and marketing.
We'll start with something very simple -- Newton's Law: "The force equals mass times acceleration."
This is something that perhaps Turkish Airlines should have studied a bit more carefully before they ran this campaign.
(Laughter) But if we rearrange this formula quickly, we can get to acceleration equals force over mass, which means that for a larger particle -- a larger mass -- it requires more force to change its direction.
It's the same with brands: the more massive a brand, the more baggage it has, the more force is needed to change its positioning.
And that's one of the reasons why Arthur Andersen chose to launch Accenture rather than try to persuade the world that Andersen's could stand for something other than accountancy.
It explains why Hoover found it very difficult to persuade the world that it was more than vacuum cleaners, and why companies like Unilever and P&amp;G keep brands separate, like Ariel and Pringles and Dove rather than having one giant parent brand.
So the physics is that the bigger the mass of an object the more force is needed to change its direction.
The marketing is, the bigger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it.
So think about a portfolio of brands or maybe new brands for new ventures.
Now, who remembers Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?
Getting a little more technical now.
So this says that it's impossible, by definition, to measure exactly the state -- i.e., the position -- and the momentum of a particle, because the act of measuring it, by definition, changes it.
So to explain that -- if you've got an elementary particle and you shine a light on it, then the photon of light has momentum, which knocks the particle, so you don't know where it was before you bensonnicole@example.net.
By measuring it, the act of measurement changes it.
The act of observation changes it.
It's the same in marketing.
So with the act of observing consumers, changes their behavior.
Think about the group of moms who are talking about their wonderful children in a focus group, and almost none of them buy lots of junk food.
And yet, McDonald's sells hundreds of millions of burgers every year.
Think about the people who are on accompanied shops in supermarkets, who stuff their trolleys full of fresh green vegetables and fruit, but don't shop like that any other day.
And if you think about the number of people who claim in surveys to regularly look for porn on the Web, it's very few.
Yet, at Google, we know it's the number-one searched for category.
So luckily, the science -- no, sorry -- the marketing is getting easier.
Luckily, with now better point-of-sale tracking, more digital media consumption, you can measure more what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they do.
So the physics is you can never accurately and exactly measure a particle, because the observation changes it.
The marketing is -- the message for marketing is -- that try to measure what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they'll do or anticipate they'll do.
So next, the scientific method -- an axiom of physics, of all science -- says you cannot prove a hypothesis through observation, you can only disprove it.
What this means is you can gather more and more data around a hypothesis or a positioning, and it will strengthen it, but it will not conclusively prove it.
And only one contrary data point can blow your theory out of the water.
So if we take an example -- Ptolemy had dozens of data points to support his theory that the planets would rotate around the Earth.
It only took one robust observation from Copernicus to blow that idea out of the water.
And there are parallels for marketing -- you can invest for a long time in a brand, but a single contrary observation of that positioning will destroy consumers' belief.
Take BP -- they spent millions of pounds over many years building up its credentials as an environmentally friendly brand, but then one little accident.
Think about Toyota.
It was, for a long time, revered as the most reliable of cars, and then they had the big recall incident.
And Tiger Woods, for a long time, the perfect brand ambassador.
Well, you know the story.
(Laughter) So the physics is that you cannot prove a hypothesis, but it's easy to disprove it -- any hypothesis is shaky.
And the marketing is that not matter how much you've invested in your brand, one bad week can undermine decades of good work.
So be really careful to try and avoid the screw-ups that can undermine your brand.
And lastly, to the slightly obscure world of entropy -- the second law of thermodynamics.
This says that entropy, which is a measure of the disorder of a system, will always increase.
The same is true of marketing.
If we go back 20 years, the one message pretty much controlled by one marketing manager could pretty much define a brand.
But where we are today, things have changed.
You can get a strong brand image or a message and put it out there like the Conservative Party did earlier this year with their election poster.
But then you lose control of it.
With the kind of digital comment creation and distribution tools that are available now to every consumer, it's impossible to control where it goes.
Your brand starts being dispersed, (Laughter) it gets more chaotic.
(Laughter) It's out of your control.
(Laughter) I actually saw him speak -- he did a good job.
But while this may be unsettling for marketers, it's actually a good thing.
This distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to the people, more in with the people.
It makes this distribution of energy a democratizing force, which is ultimately good for your brand.
So, the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase; it's a fundamental law.
The message for marketing is that your brand is more dispersed.
You can't fight it, so embrace it and find a way to work with it.
So to close, my teacher, Mr. Vutter, told me that physics is cool, and hopefully, I've convinced you that physics can teach all of us, even in the world of marketing, something special.
Thank you.
(Applause)