Can we see a company’s ideal marketing strategy in its horoscope?

“As above, so below” isn’t merely a famous quote, but a cosmic principle in the code of our existence.

Scientists, for example, have observed that the structure of an atom mirrors that of the solar system – only at a much smaller scale. And in business, a manager who leads his team forthrightly and with integrity has subordinates do just the same. Meanwhile, those who rule through fear create waves of stress that ripple down the organisation.

But knowing about the law of correspondence – shouldn’t we assume that the energies of a company and its marketing are reflected in the cosmic patterns at the time it comes into existence? Would the company’s founding chart not be a mirror of the way it marketed itself? And could placements in a particular zodiac sign tell us more about the path to customer acquisition?

Those are some of the questions that we’ll answer in this article. Because we want to know if brands with a dominant zodiac sign focus their marketing on activities that align with the principles of that sign.  

Astrological principles in the zodiac and in marketing

From Aries to Pisces, zodiac signs describe universal principles such as leadership, growth and structure. Each of these principles may be in tune with a different marketing focus.

Sagittarius, for example, representing the expansion of one’s world view – could be associated with import, export and international marketing. Meanwhile, the imaginative side of Pisces might reveal itself through multimedia marketing and subliminal messaging.

I have linked all 12 principles of the zodiac to a different marketing focus, as shown in the table below:

Based on these links, we can test if the energy of the dominant zodiac sign is indeed expressed in a company’s marketing activities.

Dominant signs in business horoscopes

The dominant sign in a horoscope is the one that exerts the strongest influence on the person, event or company to whom the horoscope belongs.

There are different ways to identify the dominant sign. Some astrologers consider only the powers and position of the planets (and see the Sun and Moon as most powerful followed by Mercury, Venus and Mars), others take into account if the planets are in signs that they rule or are exalted in, and then some add strength to particular planets when they are placed in an “important” house.

For this analysis, I chose to consider only the power of the planets and the North Node. The reason I did not work with the ascendant and medium coeli is that most business horoscopes (and definitely those dating back several decades or centuries) do not have precise founding times, such that the houses cannot be calculated. For the sake of simplicity, I also disregarded influences that many arise from a planet’s rulership, exaltation, detriment and fall – and focussed only on the relative strength of the planets.

The relative strength of the planets

The strength of planets should be related to their (potential) influence on Earth. The Sun and Moon, for example, being most visible, should have a stronger influence, than say, Neptune, which can only be seen using a horoscope. Planets closer to Earth may also have a stronger impact due to their proximity. With that in mind, each planet or element was assigned a score, so we can use these values to calculate the dominant sign:

Every time a planet or element was found in a sign, the score of that planet was added to the tally of that sign. The totals in each sign were divided by 26 (the sum of all potential factors) to obtain a percentage distribution. The sign with the highest percentage was – technically – the dominant sign.

Dominant signs vs. archetypes (strong placements)

Some business charts have relatively uniform distributions of planets in the zodiac. As such, we may end up with two or more dominant signs. And we may also find horoscopes where the percentage difference between a dominant and non-dominant sign is miniscule.

Neither of these scenarios is convenient for our analysis. Instead, I would prefer to work with companies that have clear dominants in their founding charts. That makes it easier to assess any parallels between the marketing focus and the dominant sign in the horoscope.

With that in mind, I decided to only evaluate founding charts with a significant dominance in a single sign. My chosen cutoff was a 30% minimum, as this should mean that the dominance is sufficiently strong to be visible in the brands’ marketing – provided that the original hypothesis of this article holds true.

With the 30% cut-off in mind, I went through multiple lists of the top global brands and companies and selected those with a strong placement in at least one zodiac sign. The respective brands and their dominant archetype are shown in the table below:

Companies with strong placement in a particular zodiac sign

Methodology

For each company, I researched the defining features of its marketing and considered what astrological principle(s) they represent. I then compared the principles to the company’s founding chart – which allowed me to consider if the dominant archetype mirrored the brand’s marketing focus.

You can read the full analysis of the 30 brand horoscopes, if you are interested in the specific parallels and differences between their marketing focus and dominant archetypes (or if you want to learn more about the marketing activities of these brands).

Choice of companies and potential bias

Companies were chosen from a list of top global brands and included in the analysis if:

• there was at least one founding date available
• the horoscope for that date revealed a dominant zodiac sign
• and there was enough public information on the marketing strategy used by the company

Companies that did not engage in consumer-facing marketing but only B2B marketing, were sometimes excluded, as were companies who did not (at least partially) market their products in English.

The selection favoured large companies with well-documented marketing practices, and may have led to substantial bias in the sample.

Accuracy of horoscopes and data quality

Data quality is often a limiting factor in research, and this project is no exception. On the one hand, we want astrological data to be consistent enough to allow comparison and analysis, and on the other hand, we need a sufficiently large pool of data to produce valid results.

Choosing the correct founding dates for a business

At first sight, it may seem simple to determine a businesses’ founding date – after all, we could just work with the date of incorporation.

But in many cases that date isn’t so easy to determine. What happens, for example, when you have a merger, or a company changes its legal structure, or operates for many years and only then becomes incorporated? Should you consider the starting point to be:

• When the company commenced operations
• When it was first registered, or
• When it received its current legal status?

These considerations alone could give you three different founding dates – and very different astrology charts – for a single company. And the longer an entity has been in business for, the higher the chance that it has gone through multiple transitions, perhaps changing its name, corporate structure, industry and operations.

Accurate dates can also be hard to find for companies that originated before the 1900s to 1920s, when standards for business reporting and filing were much lower than they were today. There is also a chance that historic records may have since been lost or destroyed – leaving an astrologer fewer options to work with.

For practical reasons, I have chosen to work with the founding dates of the companies that were most readily available.

How to analyse the findings: quantitative or qualitative methods?

Astrologers usually evaluate horoscopes using qualitative methods. This is because horoscopes (and the questions of study) lend themselves more towards interpretation than to statistical analysis.

However, the subjectivity of interpretations has been heavily criticised. That’s why astrologers like Gauquelin have attempted to find statistically significant relationships between planetary movements and real-world data.

Initially, I considered using both quantitative and qualitative methods, when analysing the results of my research. However, I soon found that both approaches posed specific challenges.

Bringing together quantitative and qualitative data

For one, a description of a company’s marketing strategy (e.g. brand positioning, promotional channels, etc.) is inherently qualitative. Even as marketing has become more and more data-driven, human psychology continues to drive decisions in every marketing domain – from pricing to the design of promotional campaigns.

Comparing descriptive, qualitative data to the objective placements in a company’s horoscope, is a task that will always be shaped by the interpreters’ perception. This makes it hard to determine whether any patterns, trends and observations are statistically significant, merely incidental observations or the result of researcher bias. That is why we might consider quantifying our qualitative marketing data.

How – if at all – can we quantify qualitative marketing data?

But the immediate problem would be how we quantify this qualitative marketing data. After all, it would not be unreasonable to assume that most companies in the analysis will exhibit a range of marketing activities, and those may be associated different zodiac signs.

And so, the real question is whether those activities (jointly) confirm the impression of an overarching theme or focus that corresponds to the principle of their dominant sign.

With that in mind, the simplest way to quantify marketing data would be using a point-based mechanism. Every time a company engages in a marketing activity, we could add a score of 1 to the tally of the zodiac sign that activity is linked to. Then we could add compare the tally for all zodiac signs to the distribution of the factors in the horoscope – using a chi-squared test of independence.  

While this would be easy mathematically, there are several challenges and limitations to this approach:

• There is no single, comprehensive list of all marketing activities that a company engaged and engages in. This means only observations noted by the astrologer would be recorded, almost definitely leading to sampling biases. 
• Not all marketing activities may be immediately, and effectively ascribed to a single zodiac sign. For example, a company that uses television to serve ad with discounts for its newly developed product, would simultaneously tap into Pisces (television), Scorpio (advertisements) and Aquarius (innovation) energy.
• The significance of marketing activities may differ between companies – with some allocating a sizeable part of their team, budget and resources in one area, while others focus elsewhere. Suppose two companies do some form of search engine optimisation and influencer marketing, but for one SEO is the core revenue driver, while another attracts the bulk of its clients from influencer marketing. Surely, the different distribution of energy would have to be considered.

With this in mind, it seems problematic to quantify marketing data, as the process of quantification may introduce new biases and distortions – thereby challenging the accuracy of the analysis.

Statistical significance of the data

Even if we find a fair way to quantify marketing data, we would have to consider whether the findings can be statistically significant. Would a sample of just 30 companies really offer a large enough data set to provide conclusive results?

After all, we are isolating a single variable from a complex system like a horoscope and comparing that to another singular value. This means we would have to minimise interference from and potentially test for co-dependencies between different variables in each system.

Likelihood of particular astrological placements

Assuming that each planet or factor has an equal probability of being in each zodiac sign, the chance of having at least one factor in a specific zodiac sign is: 1- (11/12)^11, which is approximately 0.61, or 61%.

Meanwhile, the probability of getting at least 3 planets in any one zodiac sign, could be calculated with the binomial probability formula:

where n = 11 (number of planets), k = 3 (number of planets we want in a particular zodiac sign) and p = 1/12 (probability of a planet being in each zodiac sign).

And we find that P(X is equal or greater than 3) is around 0.5353, meaning there is an approximately 53% chance that there will be 3 or more planets in the same zodiac sign – thereby creating a dominance of that sign.

Please bear in mind that this is just a rough approximation, as planets spend varying amounts of time in different zodiac signs – thereby somewhat skewing this analysis. This is because their orbit around the Sun is not perfectly circular, which causes them to travel at different speeds, and because planets may be in retrograde (from the Earth’s perspective), which slows down their movement through the zodiac sign.

Also, three planetary placements in a single sign would not necessarily lead to the dominance of that sign (as is the case with Uranus, Neptune and Pluto). Meanwhile, both the Sun and Moon (being just two elements) suffice to reach the 30% dominance threshold.

Even so – we can assume that a considerable part of potential business horoscopes may have been excluded from the analysis as a result of selecting only those companies with at least one dominant zodiac sign.

The probability of a specific dominant zodiac sign (e.g. Aries) would then be around 5% (as 0.53/12 = 0.046), and this could be compared to the probability of a company using a marketing focus typical of that sign.

The probability of a company using a marketing focus typical of their dominant sign

Assuming that there are 12 marketing focusses, and a business has an equal (statistical) chance of adopting any one focus, then the chance that its marketing focus is consistent with that sign is:

12 x 0.046 x 1/12 = 0.046%.

However, companies may not have an equal probability of adopting each marketing focus – and this would have to be considered in the analysis.

Alignment between dominant archetype and marketing focus

As expected, all companies engaged in some marketing activities that could be associated with their dominant zodiac sign. Overall, the primary marketing focus also aligned with the dominant astrological archetype in their founding charts – confirming our initial hypothesis. Meanwhile, other planetary positions seemed to highlight secondary factors in the success of the brands’ marketing strategies.

However, it did seem as though the position of the Sun alone could sometimes explain the marketing strategy that a brand chooses. And astrologically of course – the Sun, which was valued at 4 points – always has Mercury and Venus within a certain distance of itself. Thus, the Sun’s position will have a strong effect on the overall distribution of planets in a company horoscope – and may therefore exert a similar influence on a brand’s marketing strategy and positioning.

Could the Sun sign alone determine the marketing focus of a brand?

To verify if the Sun sign alone determines the marketing focus of a brand, we can consider all those horoscopes where the Sun is in a non-dominant sign. This allows us to isolate the effect of the Sun on a company’s marketing.

In our study, 9 in 30 brands had a horoscope where the Sun was not in the dominant sign:

But what influence did the Sun have on these companies and their marketing focus?

For BMW, AirBnB, Adidas and Heineken, the Sun seemed to shape the brand choices – from a deliberately created brand image to specific brand elements such as the company logo. For Procter and Gamble and Amazon (both on the Gemini-Sagittarius axis), the Sun seemed to shape the choice of marketing channels used to promote the brand.

The Sun’s influence on UPS and Sony is less clear. In Sony’s case, the Taurus placement only seemed to impact the pricing strategy, while the Virgo influence on UPS was so strong that I would wonder if the Sun placement was in any way a reflection of the company’s marketing activities.

The influence of the Sun sign on a brand’s marketing strategy

It is undeniable that the Sun sign can have a strong influence on the marketing strategy of a brand. But if we look at complexity of a business’ marketing strategy – it seems almost reductionist to boil it down to a single attribute in their founding chart.  After all, most of the companies we analysed use marketing activities that can be associated with a range of zodiac signs, or more precisely, their underlying principles.

And in looking at those companies’ charts where the Sun is in a non-dominant sign, in many cases, we find that the Sun has shaped how the company attracts attention and how it is seen in the market. In fact, the Sun seems to have a disproportionately strong influence on brand perception and positioning – at least for BMW, UPS, AirBnB, Adidas, eBay, Heineken and P & G.

I am somewhat hesitant to draw the same conclusion for Sony and Amazon, where the Sun placement does not (at least to me) seem to influence the company’s core values and outward depiction in a striking way.

It would be worth exploring in more depth to more precisely understand what influence the Sun sign has on a brand’s positioning – but for now, it seems fair to say, that looking at the Sun sign alone would be a reductionist and perhaps oversimplified way of analysing a company’s marketing focus.

Conclusion

All 30 companies analysed in this article have pursued a marketing strategy that corresponds – at least in part – to the dominant sign in their horoscope.

That said, there have been differences in how the dominant sign has been expressed. Some businesses have brought the underlying principles of a sign to life through their core values, their choice of marketing materials, or in certain cases, through the role and influence of marketing teams within the wider structure and systems of their organisation.

For example, Samsung mainly expressed its Pisces archetype through the use of television as a marketing channel, and sound as a tool within that. In contrast, an organisation like Heineken has expressed its Capricorn archetype through internal marketing policies, structures and dominance within the beverage market.

Looking at the chart of Heineken, we can observe that the brand has a Saturn placement in its dominant sign of Capricorn, which could be what predisposed the business towards expressing its Capricorn archetype through the systems, hierarchies and authorities typically associated with Saturn.

These differences can be further investigated to allow for more nuanced astrological interpretations and help develop better recommendations for businesses seeking to address marketing challenges through business astrology.

It is quite likely – for example – that the planets in the dominant sign – as well as any aspects to those planets could have a bearing on the marketing of the company. In this analysis, some factors have been considered when interpreting individual company horoscopes, but a more systematic approach could help to better conceptualise the marketing implications of each planetary position.

In general terms, though, the relationship between marketing focus and dominant sign seems to be supported by the business horoscopes and marketing strategies of the 30 companies analysed in this article.

So yes – I will say that we can see a company’s marketing strategy in its business horoscopes.

It will be interesting to see if these results are replicated by other astrologers, when trying to verify the findings using other brand horoscopes.

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