Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Researchers Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn created SignificantObjects.com as a way to show the value of storytelling. They acquired several random inexpensive knick-knacks from eBay actions — averaging $1.50 per purchase. They had writers create heartfelt stories about these tchotchkes: items such as a butter dish, a porcelain miniature and a mini jar of mayonnaise.

Altogether, the $128.74 investment yielded $3,612.51 when re-sold with the stories. By adding an intriguing story, a simple Missouri shot glass purchased for $1 sold for $76. Here’s part of the tale:

“See that freaky little bird? That’s the state bird, my friend. The Missouri Hunt-and-Pecker. Never heard of ’em? Well, then I guess you’ve never been to Missouri, have you? Maybe passed through, didn’t get out of the car. Or changed planes in the airport, or went up in the Arch once, just to say you’d done it. But that’s not Missouri to me. St. Louis is the gateway, sure, but you want to know Missouri you need to drive a few hours into the corn, you want to visit St. Joseph, up through Maryville — skirt the Iowa border, though Iowa’s a sore point from where I sit. You need to get lost in Missouri or you never really were there in the first place. Even then you won’t be likely to meet the Hunt-and-Pecker unless you circulate a manuscript or two.”

Having an effective storytelling strategy may not always generate quick conversions, but it can illustrate why a consumer should invest in your product instead of a competitor’s. In this case, storytelling added massive return on objects originally valued at a pittance....

What happens when you hire creative writers to make up stories about cheap trinkets, and they post these stories along with the items online for sale? This was exactly what Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn did back in 2009 as part of their storytelling experiment, Significant Objects. 

Significant Objects was a literary and anthropological experiment that “demonstrated that the effect of narrative on any given object’s subjective value can be measured objectively.” For this experiment, Walker and Glenn asked 100 creative writers to invent stories about $129 worth of items and then sold them on eBay to see if the stories enhanced the value of the objects. In case you were wondering how the experiment went: the net profit was $3,6 million -- a 2,700-percent increase in final markup....