Marketing flywheels power money printing machines, not electric turbines.

This article isn't meant to require an understanding of physics. It's meant to help people not familiar with marketing understand the principal of building momentum in a channel.

That’s not my argument. What I’m saying is that a flywheel is a poor analogy for what is being described.

If you understand what a flywheel is, and I tell you that there is such a thing as a “marketing flywheel”, you’re no closer to understanding what I’m talking about.

A much better physical analogy would be a chain reaction, or something like compounding if you wanted a mathematical one: i.e. anything where the initial investments fuel outsized returns later on.

> If you understand what a flywheel is, and I tell you that there is such a thing as a “marketing flywheel”, you’re no closer to understanding what I’m talking about.

Clearly a "marketing flywheel" is something which keeps the marketing momentum going between marketing campaigns, reducing the spiking to something more steady... well at least to me :)

So there is also no such thing as a business model flywheel like a platform as Amazon for example?

https://medium.com/aws-enterprise-collection/your-enterprise...

Yes.

All these examples seem to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding about what a flywheel is and what it can do. They are primarily for storing and releasing energy; they don’t generate their own momentum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel

Who cares? Seriously, it’s a metaphor that no one has issues understanding, so why the pedantic nitpicking?

I hadn’t heard of the metaphor before and understood it based on the words used.

Flywheels aren’t some kind of academics only term. If you’ve ever touched a mechanical fishing rod, you have used a fly wheel.

I'd never heard of it and my best guess based on the name would have been some kind of way of "storing up" marketing effort to release it later, like if you had extra marketing $$$ and needed to use it before the end of the quarter but would prefer to spread it out.

So the hope is to use concepts people aren't familiar with to describe other concepts they also aren't familiar with?

Sounds like a typical HN commenter.

So then would it make more sense to call it a windmill?

I'd use a snowball, to convey the growing nature.

Or just say what it is, compounding growth.

You guys always gotta make stuff more complicated than it is.

The English language is full of idioms and metaphors; marketers are hardly the only ones using them.

Actually "snowball" probably makes more intuitive sense to people than "compounding growth."

A snowball rolling down hill is a metaphor for compounding growth.

I believe the idea is that a flywheel maintains momentum and makes the rest of the process easier, as opposed to starting cold each time.

That’s not what is being described though: “You put in the same amount of work (or less) each time, and get more and more out of it the more you repeat it.”

I guess that works if the "stuff" you put in is torque, and the effect is the angular velocity?

In linear coordinates, they could have called it the marketing frictionless skateboard - the more you kick the faster it goes!

Yes the math does not support the metaphor. This is the kind of thing that would irk me but I'm fine with this one. I imagine a massive flywheel where each input imperceptibly changes angular velocity and in early stages is moving in slow motion like a joke. Keep at it and it becomes an unstoppable beast (neglecting friction of course). This is content marketing. Nothing until it's something.

Yeah I thought this article would be about companies that just barely make back their marketing spend, but then in the long-term reach success from being big/getting brand value.