- Buy cheap things on eBay
- Give each one to a writer and ask them to tell a story about it
- Put each item back on eBay with the story attached
- Analyze the data
Enjoyed this article?
Take part in the discussion
Related blog/content
I don’t want to hear about spear-fishing ever again. I’m Charlie, the head of ABM at Velocity. And I have a bone to pick with tired ABM metaphors. Good…
Charlie Langley | 28. 03. 2024
Even before AI and Google SGE came gunning for everyone’s search traffic, B2B was struggling with SEO. Despite endless effort, lots of pages languish in…
Joe Strugs | 13. 03. 2024
What’s the secret of B2B SEO? Some say volume. Others say clusters. We say it’s collaboration. Find out why we’re right.
Stan Woods | 05. 03. 2024
Comments
Robert Levers June 1st, 2010
Loved the conclusion reached, noted on the DoubleThink site you linked to: “the object was merely the vehicle for the story.” Isn’t that what branding has always been about?
Doug Kessler June 1st, 2010
Me too. So ‘Delta Force Kill VI’ isn’t a Steven Segal vehicle. Steven Segal is a ‘Delta Force Kill VI’ vehicle.
Andrew Bruce Smith June 30th, 2010
Great experiment – of course, I presume his friends and writers, etc produced their stories for free as part of the experiment.
Would be interesting to know which stories resulted in the highest sale price increase – and how much the writer would have charged for their work if it had to be paid for. You’d then get a measure of true impact on net profit. Still, would be great it you could charge for content/story creation based upon a track record of proven impact on net income 😉
Doug Kessler June 30th, 2010
All good points Andrew.
You can access the data on the Significant Objects site.
I don’t think they factored in story-creation costs.
I’d love to see the equivalent experiment but instead of adding a story related to the object, just add a really compelling description of the object. Then we’d see the value of words, removing the celebrity writer and novelty factors.