Marketing channels and the position of Mercury in business charts

In traditional astrology, Mercury is the messenger, representing communication and movement along short-distance networks. These networks can include customers, suppliers and strategic partners.

Two main networks that marketers communicate with are prospects and existing customers. Therefore, we might posit that the position of Mercury in a brand’s founding chart shows how it communicates with prospects and customers.

More precisely, the zodiac sign housing Mercury might show us what marketing channels work well for (and will therefore be adopted by) the company.

What Mercury placements could reveal about marketing channels

Based on the current literature and understanding of astrology, I have come up with different marketing channels for a Mercury position in each of the 12 zodiac signs.

However, analysing all the marketing channels a company uses against its Mercury placement would require extensive (insider) information and be time-consuming, as each combination of sign and marketing channel would have to be independently verified with at least 30 data points to produce accurate statistical results.

To simplify matters, I therefore came up with a single hypotheses that will be tested in this article:

Hypothesis: Brands with the largest advertising spending tend to have Mercury in Scorpio placement.

This hypothesis is based on a few assumptions:

• a Mercury in Scorpio placement will show that a company is drawn towards advertising as a marketing channel, AND
• a company with such placements will benefit disproportionately from advertising, incentivising them to maximise spending on ads to drive up revenues.

It would be equally reasonable to assume the contrary. After all, a company that benefits disproportionately from advertising, needs to invest less money to achieve a specific goal – and this might reduce overall spending.

But before we debate what would be the most plausible conclusion – let’s take a look at our data.

Top advertisers and their Mercury placements

To test the hypothesis, I used a list of the 100 high-spending brands on advertising in 2022. While this list is probably far from perfect – in that it is biased towards large companies – I’ve had to further narrow the list down to include only those companies where a founding date was available. This left me with 67 brands overall, which is smaller than I would have hoped.

Will Mercury in Scorpio be overrepresented in the sample?

Due to the relatively small sample size, I therefore decided that we would test for an over-representation of Mercury in Scorpio placements among the 67 brands in the sample.

I assumed that Mercury would be normally distributed across all 12 zodiac signs, given a large, random sample of brands, and that results would be significant, if they were at least 5 points away from the mean. In other words, zodiac signs either 0 or 11 or more Mercury placements were considered an interesting find, that should be hard to attribute merely to chance.

The 67 companies and their Mercury placements

As you can see in the table below, not a single company among the 67 largest advertisers had a Mercury in Scorpio placement. Instead, Capricorn was the sign in which Mercury was predominantly found.

This runs counter to the initial hypothesis that Mercury in Scorpio placements can be associated with high spending on advertising – and it seems as though the contrary may be the case.

Chi-squared test of independence based on the Mercury placements

Mercury placements in zodiac signs are a form of categorical data. As such, we cannot analyse the data based on how far an individual data point is away from the mean. What we can do, instead, is to test the significance of our findings using a chi-squared test of independence.

Performing the chi-squared test of independence

A chi-squared test compares actual (categorical) observations to the expected frequencies. For our chi-squared test, we assume that the Mercury placements are normally distributed across zodiac signs.

Using the chi-squared formula:

χ² = Σ ((O – E)² / E) = 17.3590

As there are 12 zodiac signs, we will work with 11 degrees of freedom for this test. We can then calculate the critical value, which is 19.675 at α = 0.05 and 24.725 at α = 0.01.

Notice that χ² = 17.3590 is less than both these critical values. Using a chi-square distribution calculator, the p-value for χ² = 17.3590 with df = 11 is approximately 0.0978.

Interpretation of the chi-squared test

As our calculated χ² (17.3590) is less than the critical values, and our p-value is greater than 0.05, we fail to reject the null hypothesis.

According to the chi-squared test, we do not have enough evidence to conclude that the distribution of Mercury placements across zodiac sign differs significantly from a uniform distribution. The main reason for this is the small sample size, in which extremes are more likely to be observed. Thus, the hypothesis would have to be tested against a larger sample to determine if the results are significant.

That said, it is worth nothing that Mercury in Scorpio placements were not at all observed in the sample. We can calculate the likelihood of this occurring using a binomial test.

Binomial test to calculate probability of observing 0 Mercury in Scorpio placements

For our binomial test, we have:

• 67 trials – the number of companies in our sample
• 0 successes – the number of companies with Mercury in Scorpio placements
• and an expected probability of 1/12 for each sign

Using the binomial distribution function:

P (X ≤ 0) = ≈ 0.003152. Thus, the probability of observing 0 companies with Mercury in Scorpio placements (given the expectation of an equal distribution across all zodiac signs) is approximately 0.3152%, or about 1 in 317.

As p = 0.003152 is much smaller than the significance level of 0.05, we can be pretty confident, that the low number of Mercury in Scorpio placements is statistically significant.

Rejecting our initial hypothesis

As such, it seems reasonable to reject our initial hypothesis – and instead accept the exact opposite:

Brands with the largest advertising spending are unlikely to have Mercury in Scorpio placements. 

It would be interesting to see this hypothesis tested and verified against a larger data set.

Binomial test to calculate the probability of observing 11 Mercury in Capricorn placements

We can also perform a binomial test to calculate the probability of observing 11 companies with Mercury in Capricorn placements. Using the same formula as above, we will now do a two-tailed test to obtain our p-value.

For our two-tailed test, our p-value will be calculated as follows:  

P value=P(X≥11)+P(X≤11)−P(X=11)

In this case, p = 0.0183, which the proportion of companies with Mercury in Capricorn placements differs significantly from the expected probability.

The over-representation of Mercury in Capricorn placements among the largest companies also seems plausible, given that large companies may prefer to use marketing channels that are credible and authoritative to maintain their reputation and social standing. This is because the scale of large companies means that a more systematic, conservative approach to all business activities (including marketing) may be required to ensure seamless operations.

However, it would be interesting to see if the Mercury in Capricorn placements are really an independent factor – or if the result comes from a high representation of brands with Sun in Capricorn placements. After all, Mercury always stays within around 28 degrees of orb from the Sun, and a Sun in Capricorn placement is therefore a good predictor of Mercury in Capricorn, Aquarius or Sagittarius.

Constraints and challenges in the analysis

Not all astrological data lends itself well to statistical analysis. Therefore, such analyses are limited to astrological information that we can quantify and measure.

For example, I initially wanted to test if brands using a particular marketing channel have a Mercury placement in the zodiac sign associated with that channel. That proved to be problematic for a number of reasons.

Multi-channel marketing and the challenge of one-to-many relationships

For one, most companies today do not rely on a single marketing channel to communicate with their target audience. Walt Disney, for example, uses comic books, television, theme parks, merchandise, music, and commercial partnerships as part of its marketing strategy. These marketing channels may be associated with different zodiac signs. But Mercury can only be found in one zodiac sign in any horoscope.

This one-to-many relationship complicates the analysis. How would we, for example, deal with conflicting representations? In the case of Disney for example, some marketing channels such as the commercial partnerships, fit well with the brand’s Mercury in Libra placement. But the same cannot be said for television, music or theme parks.

With that in mind, how should we interpret our data? Could we look at only the most dominant marketing channel? And if so, how would that be defined? Perhaps by the amount spent on that marketing channel, by the revenue the company makes through that channel – or perhaps another way.

As you can see, there is substantial room here to analyse our data using a range of different approaches, all of which will likely produce different results.

Availability and reliability of the data

Beside the many open questions, the statistical analysis would also be defined by the availability of data. Companies, in particular, have no need to publicly share which marketing channels they use – and may even prefer to keep some of that information secret, so as to not take away their competitive advantage.

Now, of course, we can see if a company uses a particular marketing channel to communicate with its target audience – but more meaningful information, like the effectiveness of said channel, the budget and resources allocated to it, and the revenue generated are all internal forms of information. And even when some of that data is released or shared, it is very hard to verify its reliability as an outsider to that organisation.

Therefore, the present analysis was confined to publicly available marketing information – compiled in a single source. This poses new questions – for knows if the sources’ information is entirely accurate, but given that it was the only data I had available, I thought we might try an analysis of it nonetheless.

Perhaps, in the coming years, other astrologers, with more or newer data at their disposal, will be able to verify if my tentative conclusion that “Brands with the largest advertising spending are unlikely to have Mercury in Scorpio placements” can be confirmed.The same, of course, goes for the observation that large advertisers tend to have Mercury in Capricorn placements.

P.S. If you are interested in the influence of Venus on a brand’s pricing strategy, continue reading here.