NASA’s Artemis program has put the moon back in public conversation in a way it hasn’t been since Apollo. That felt like a reason to pull up something I wrote a while back, an essay about what celestial mechanics can teach us about participation.
The moon has never touched the ocean.
Think about that. The moon is 238,900 miles away. It has never made contact with a single drop of seawater. And yet, twice every day, the ocean moves toward it. Billions of gallons of water, rising and falling in perfect rhythm, pulled by something that has never pushed.
This is gravity. Pull, not push. This is what participation could look like if we stopped trying to force it.
The Doctrine of Push
Marketing has always been a pushing discipline.
Push messages into awareness. Push products into consideration. Push conversions through the funnel. The language is violent if you listen closely: impressions, penetration, reach, frequency. We’re trying to get inside, to break through, to force attention.
This made sense in an era of scarcity. When there were three TV channels and one newspaper, pushing your message into limited space was the only way to be heard. The push doctrine was a response to real constraints.
Those constraints are gone. There’s infinite space now: infinite channels, infinite content, infinite noise. And still we push. Harder and harder, louder and louder, more and more frequently. The budget goes up. The impressions increase. The actual engagement plateaus or declines.
The push model is exhausted. Pushing still works, somewhat. But everyone else is pushing too, and more force doesn’t help when the room is already full of force.
The moon suggests an alternative.
The Physics of Pull
Gravity is strange. It’s the weakest of the fundamental forces, trillions of times weaker than electromagnetism. And yet it shapes the universe. Galaxies form around it. Stars ignite because of it. The tides obey it absolutely.
How does something so weak have such power? Because it’s always on.
The moon doesn’t run campaigns. It pulls constantly, continuously, every second of every day. The force is tiny, imperceptible in any single moment. But it’s relentless. And over time, relentless tiny forces move oceans.
This is the physics of pull: constant presence over force, attraction over intrusion. Not loud. Not pushy. Creating conditions where the natural movement is toward you.
The push marketer asks: how do I force attention? The pull marketer asks: how do I create gravity?
The moon doesn’t run campaigns.
What Creates Gravitational Pull?
The moon creates pull through mass. It’s a quarter the size of Earth, massive enough that its gravity extends across 238,900 miles to shape our oceans. No effort required. The pull is a consequence of what the moon is, not what the moon does.
Brands that create pull have analogous qualities, things they are rather than things they do.
Substance. You have to actually be something worth moving toward. The moon doesn’t create gravity through branding. It creates gravity through mass. Brands that pull have genuine weight: real expertise, real community, real value. The gravity is a consequence of substance, not a substitute for it.
Consistency. The moon doesn’t pull harder some days than others. The gravitational field is constant. Brands that pull show up reliably, present even when they’re not speaking. The pull is ambient, a background force that shapes behavior whether anyone’s paying attention or not.
Patience. Gravitational effects are slow. The tide doesn’t respond instantly. It builds over hours. Brands that try to create immediate pull from a single campaign are misunderstanding the physics. Real pull accumulates. It takes time for the water to move.
Distance. The moon pulls without touching. It doesn’t need to be in direct contact with the ocean to influence it. Brands that pull well understand that some distance is necessary. Too close and you’re not pulling. You’re pushing. The over-personalized notification, the re-targeting that follows you across every tab, the engagement prompt the moment you pause on a post — these feel like reach but they function like pressure. The space between is where the gravity works.
The Tidal Rhythm
The tide doesn’t just come in. It goes out. That’s not a failure of the moon’s marketing strategy. It’s how tidal systems work.
Every pull has a corresponding release. The ocean moves toward the moon, then recedes. High tide, low tide, high tide again. The rhythm is as important as the pull.
Brands that understand pull also understand release. They don’t try to keep customers in constant engagement. They create rhythms: periods of intensity followed by periods of rest. The tide comes in during a product launch, a community event, a seasonal campaign. Then it goes out. Then it comes back.
Constant push exhausts. A tidal rhythm gives people something to sync with instead. They know when to pay attention and when to rest. The predictability of the rhythm is part of the pull.
Entrainment
Living things sync with tidal rhythms.
Intertidal creatures, crabs, mussels, sea anemones, have internal clocks that match the tidal cycle. Even in a laboratory tank with no tidal variation, they continue to behave as if the tide were coming and going. The rhythm is that deeply embedded.
This is called entrainment: the synchronization of an organism’s rhythms with external cycles. We do it with the sun, with work weeks, with seasons, with content cycles. We’re built to sync with environmental cycles.
Brands that create reliable rhythms become entrainment points. Customers sync with the cadence of your communication, your releases, your community events. The rhythm becomes expected, anticipated, part of how they experience the year.
The entrainment creates loyalty that push can’t match. Pushed messages interrupt. Entrained rhythms integrate. You become part of how customers experience time itself.
Predicting the Pull
We can predict the tides centuries in advance.
The position of the moon, the sun, the shape of the coastline: calculable centuries out. We know when high tide will occur in any harbor on any date in 2200. Ships schedule their movements around it. Coastal communities plan their lives around it.
The reliability of the rhythm matters as much as the rhythm itself. Customers who know your cadence can plan around it. They can anticipate, prepare to engage, rather than being caught off-guard by a push they didn’t see coming. Predictability creates the conditions for willing participation.
The Moon’s Indifference
The strangest thing about the moon’s relationship with the ocean: the moon doesn’t care.
The moon isn’t trying to move the tides. It has no strategy, no goals, no metrics for ocean engagement. It’s just there, being massive, and the ocean responds. The pull is utterly impersonal.
I find this oddly liberating for thinking about brand gravity.
The most powerful pulls aren’t desperate. They’re not trying to engage you. They’re just being what they are, substantial, consistent, present, and the engagement follows. The neediness that characterizes so much marketing is anti-gravitational. Neediness collapses gravity. It pushes people away.
The moon doesn’t need the ocean to respond. It will continue being massive whether the tides obey or not. Brands with genuine gravity have a similar quality. They’re doing what they do because it’s what they are, not because they need your response to validate them.
This is different from indifference to customers. It’s more like confidence, a centeredness that doesn’t require constant external validation. The pull is a byproduct of substance, not a performance designed to extract reaction.
Learning from Celestial Mechanics
The moon teaches a few things about participation worth naming plainly.
Push interrupts. Pull accumulates. In the short term, push looks more effective. In the long term, pull moves oceans.
Gravity requires mass. You can’t create pull through tactics alone. You need substance: real value, real expertise, real community. The pull is a consequence of what you are, not what you say about yourself.
Rhythms matter. Tidal rhythms, not constant engagement. High tide, low tide. Activity, rest. Customers entrain to reliable cycles. Unpredictable pushing exhausts them.
Distance is necessary. The moon pulls precisely because it doesn’t push. The space between brand and customer is where gravitational attraction does its work. Too close and you’re not pulling. You’re pushing.
Patience is essential. Tides build over hours. Gravitational effects accumulate over cycles. If you’re measuring pull on a weekly basis, you’re measuring the wrong thing.
The moon never gave a presentation about its engagement strategy. We, however, build decks. It never optimized its approach based on quarterly metrics. It just showed up, massive and consistent, and the ocean moved. Participation followed.
Maybe that’s enough.