Don’t tell ‘em about the money—show ‘em the money
Photo: Hatice Yardım
What’s the best ROI you’ve ever enjoyed from a marketing initiative?
50% – 100% – 200%?
Please.
Anthropologists Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn decided to create an experiment to measure the quantitative power of stories. They called it the “Significant Objects Experiment,” and it went like this:
First they bought a bunch of junk off eBay, small items that cost just over a dollar apiece.
Then they hired authors to write micro-stories about these items. The stories didn’t make any claims about the objects, like ‘this came over on the Mayflower’ or anything like that. They were just stories, like
“I remember my grandmother had a collection of wooden animals on her mantle. My favorite was the elephant, until one day when my brother and I were shooting bb guns in the house and we broke it. She never noticed that we glued its trunk on backwards, until…”
Then they re-listed everything on eBay. Same items, same pictures, same everything. The only difference was that they replaced the description of the item with the story.
What was the effect?
The items they bought for $125 sold for $3,612.
That’s an ROI of 2,806%.
If you’d like to transform your marketing ROI through the power of story, email Rustle & Spark today.