STORIES FOR STORYTELLERS
If you tell a story about any object, could you sell it for more than another identical object without a story?
Right now, there are many insignificant objects around you. Cheap, tacky, normal, easy to replace or change, common, mass-produced. Nothing special.
If you put a story on one of those objects, you tell a story, would that give it more value?
And why would that happen? Exactly how would a story thrown on top of an object, arbitrarily placed on it, make it more valuable to someone? Why would someone pay more for an object with a story thrown on it, than for another one exactly the same in every way, but without a story?
In 2021, something interesting happened in Mexico, in Monterrey specifically.
A child earned a total of $11,000 pesos ($550 USD) selling imaginary friends to his classmates at school. Not all at once, but over a period of time. A lousy journalism only reported this information:
“Thanks to this ingenious idea, the 7-year-old managed to sell 25 imaginary friends and collected the sum of 500 pesos in a single day.
According to local media, teachers at the school where Jorge attends commented that if the children interacted with their purchase, ‘the other students began to interact with the imaginary friends they bought. ’
After the directors and teachers discovered the business, they called the parents of the minor to inform them about their son’s successful “business.”
The father mentioned that his son is a great fan of the television program Shark Tank Mexico, and perhaps that is where he was inspired by the idea that made him so popular among his friends.
Now Jorge will be monitored by teachers to avoid more businesses of this type.
Shark Tank Mexico is a program in which great Mexican businessmen such as Arturo Elías Ayub, Rodrigo Herrera Aspra, Patricia Armendáriz Guerra, Carlos Bremer Gutiérrez participate, who in each episode listen to entrepreneurs looking for investors to enhance their products.
As the note points out, unfortunately the child is now “monitored” and perhaps even taken to therapy. That is education in Mexico.
It is clear that what this very young talent was selling was history, and what his colleagues bought were stories.
From 2021, let’s go back to 2009.
Rob Walker broke his favorite cup.
A random object. It hadn’t cost him more than a couple of dollars, he hadn’t bought it in a museum or it was an antique, it didn’t come from abroad, he hadn’t inherited it, it hadn’t been given to him by his wife or son, obviously it wasn’t from any brand. It was nothing more than a mass-produced object like millions. Something like any object in Toy Story (that’s what you thought, right?).
But it hurt to lose it.
Why? After all, he could replace it with another one exactly the same, even new. Aesthetically, the object was worthless.
But he missed it because of what he could remember from seeing it, from using it.
And he asked himself a question: a cheap, worthless object, if you put a story on it, would that story make it more valuable, even more monetary value than another one without a story?
He didn’t have any doubts.
With Joshua Glen they thought of an experiment to test their idea. They would buy a bunch of objects like that cup (cheap, mass-produced, etc.) but they would put a story on each one. And then they would put them up for sale. They contacted writers. The project had no budget or profit motive and they told the writers so. People got excited. Between the two of them they did the work (contacting and scheduling the writers, taking the photos, uploading them to E Bay, editing and uploading the stories, buying the objects, and so on).
In total, all the objects in the experiment cost $128 USD ($2,560 Mexican pesos).
The total amount of their sale amounted to $3,612 USD ($72,240 Mexican pesos) which they donated to charity.
The experiment was entirely a leisure project. Otium: time spent on activities that are valuable in and of themselves, as opposed to necotium: what one has to do to achieve another goal, such as working to earn money to support oneself.
When they questioned the buyers, they found that there were fans of the writers, buyers who paid to support their favorite writer. But the vast majority of buyers stated that it was the story that made them decide to buy. By the way: each and every item went up in value. There was not a single one that sold for less or the same as the cost to the team.
Another explanation from the buyers was that they loved the project, the crazy idea.
Rob Walker explains the results as follows:
“We called on people to create stories. The objects were an excuse for the stories… that at the same time no one would have read without the object, or that would not have been read in the same way without the object.”
Let’s go back further, to 2009 to 2007. Joshua Glen explains the origin of the idea:
“I had written a book in 2007 called Taking Things Seriously, which was real-life stories… I asked people to tell me about objects that were meaningful and important to them in their lives, usually very surprising and ordinary objects that had a big story associated with them in some way. I had read Rob’s book Buying In, which was a synthesis of his Consumed column, which is an amazing column in the New York Times Magazine. Our books came out around the same time, and that kind of merged our streams, so the fact that our books came out at the same time brought us together.”
Rob Walker on the origin of the project:
“It occurred to me that people talk about how the meaning of objects comes from their history. And I was interested in whether you could measure that. And what would be a way to measure it? And from the absurd idea, to the fun idea was to see what would happen if people made up stories, picked random objects, and people made up totally false stories and then auctioned those objects off. So that would be the true measure of value. I spent a good chunk of time doing nothing about that idea. And then Josh’s book, Taking Things Seriously, came out.”
I end this text with the biographies of the creators:
Rob Walker is an author, journalist, and educator. He writes Branded, a weekly column on marketing and branding for Fast Company, and a biweekly newsletter, The Art of Noticing. From 2019 to 2021 he was a senior writer and columnist for Marker, a business publication on Medium, covering design, technology, marketing, and culture. A longtime contributor to The New York Times, he wrote “The Workologist” for the Sunday business section from 2013 to 2018; His column “Consumed” appeared in The New York Times Magazine from 2004 to 2011.
Joshua Glenn, American writer, editor, and semiotic analyst. He is the co-founder of the websites HiLobrow, Significant Objects, and Semionaut. From 1992 to 2001 Glenn was editor and co-editor of Hermenaut, a periodical of philosophy and cultural criticism, described as “a fanzine that gives voice to independent intellectual thought… an academic journal without the university, a sounding board for thinking people operating outside the ivory tower.”
Interesting, isn’t it?
