Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
The Value of Stories
Posted 2010.05.07
What is the actual value of a story? Are people prepared to pay more for something if there is a story attached to it? It turns out that they are. That is the outcome of a very original experiment by writer / NYT columnist Rob Walker. I saw Rob speak about his Significant Objects project, a project which I think might have generated a very significant dataset.
Here is what Rob did. He purchased a bunch of random objects on Ebay, most of them for less than $4. He then distributed the objects to his friends, fellow writers and artists and asked them to write a short story about the object they were given. He then put the objects back up for sale on ebay with the story in the description to see if people would pay more for the object now there is a story attached to it.
It turned out they did. When he sold the first 100 objects, he essentially sold $120 worth of objects for $3,612 – a 2,776% significance markup as he calls it. The object in the pictire above was the highest seller of the 1st wave of products he sold – $193 for a statue he initially bought for $3. He even sold a 25c plastic banana for $75.
So people were prepared to pay a lot more than the initial value of the storyless object. In fact the difference was so big that Rob concluded that the real value was in the story – the object was merely the vehicle for the story.
That’s very interesting and it obviously gives us a view in how brands work. But what I find most interesting about the experiment is the dataset it created that showed the exact monetary value of stories. I would love to analyze that data to see what really drove the value of the story. Was it the object, the synergy between the story and the object, the reputation of the writer or are there any attributes in the story itself that give us clues about what creates its value.
The data is available on the website. I might play around with it if I find the time. Here is the video of Rob Walker’s presentation at PSFK.
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great post as usual!
Keep up the good work, I like your writing.
nice post. thanks.