John da Maia writes about the time he bumped into Breaking Bad actor Bryan Cranston before a meeting at Amazon’s headquarters.
Cranston told him…
If you analyze the world, you will find that you have been told stories since you were born. You need stories to make sense of the world.
And the most important thing: people pay billions of dollars to hear a story.
John goes on to recount an experiment performed by a journalist back in 2009…
[The journalist] wanted to find out if storytelling was powerful enough to make people spend more money on ordinary / low-value objects.
His strategy was brilliant: have creative writers invent stories about the objects and then post them on eBay and understand if the invented stories increase the value of the object measured by the eBay auction.
He bought 200 objects with an average of $1 each. The objects couldn’t be clothing or anything that could be considered artwork. The results were mind-blowing.
One example was a plastic banana 🍌 bought for $0.25 and sold for $76. Another was a mug bought for $0.39 and sold for $31.
All because of the compelling stories the writers attached to those objects.
If you want to get better at storytelling yourself, two great books on the topic:
- Building a StoryBrand (8m video summary)…
- Storyworthy (18m author TED Talk)…
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