By Matt Johnson
In 2004, a piece of chewing gum sold for $14,000 on eBay. The gum didn’t confer any special qualities. It didn’t promise to endow the new owner with immortality. Heck, it didn’t even taste good. So why the exorbitant price?
Britney Spears inadvertently spat it out. One “lucky” concert attendee caught the gum, listed it on eBay, and was handsomely rewarded.
If you’re prone to think that dropping $14k on a piece of used chewing gum is a little crazy, you’re in good company. But for the right person, there’s a bustling market for all kinds of celebrity items. During Kanye West’s 2015 “Yeezus” tour, literal bags of air from his shows fetched upwards of $500. Justin Timberlake’s leftover scraps of French Toast went for over $3000, while a snippet of Justin Bieber’s hair drove a $40k price tag at a charity auction.
There’s a lot to say about what these sales indicate about modern celebrity culture. But when we dig deeper, we can easily see that this isn’t a new trend. And, as we’ll see, it isn’t limited to celebrity culture at all.
Certain, specific things are valued drastically more than other things of that same category. Any ordinary piece of gum is worth about 20 cents. But a particular piece of gum – perhaps previously in the mouth of our favorite celebrity? Potentially priceless.
Understanding this comes down to a strange quirk of human psychology. In our minds, otherwise ordinary objects can be easily infused with greater meaning and significance. This goes beyond the simple impact of celebrity ownership. Instead, it’s a fundamental feature of how we value objects (and products!) that we encounter. Because of this, it can provide a massive edge to marketers, who can harness this phenomenon to drive behavior.
But first: what exactly is this phenomenon?
The Soul of Otherwise Ordinary Objects
As crazy as Britney Spears’ chewing gum is, there’s always been a massive market for celebrity items. JFK’s rocking chair was bought for $60k, while Audrey Hepburn’s working script for Breakfast at Tiffany’s fetched nearly $1M. In 2017, Paul Newman’s Rolex went for $17M.
This isn’t a new fad. Instead, it’s a broad feature of human neuroscience: our brain is sensitive to what it perceives as the deeper, hidden spirit of an object. You can think of this essence as an object’s soul; it’s the hidden nature that supersedes the thing’s physical parts.
So is it just that we like things once owned by celebrities? Research suggests that this may be part of it, but the phenomenon cuts much deeper. It’s about how our brain forms these fundamental beliefs – real or imagined – about the object’s history. It’s the story of the thing that infuses it with a deeper essence, which in turn, enhances its value. Celebrity ownership is simply one type of history that an object could have.
These tendencies are fundamental to human development, and we can see them from an early age. It seems to be one of the reasons, for example, that children place such a heavy emphasis on THAT specific, sentimental toy. There’s no previous celebrity ownership there, but that teddy bear has its own unique story, infusing it with powerful lifeblood.
The psychologist Paul Bloom tested this idea directly with a slightly mischievous set of experiments. He tricked young children into believing that he had made exact copies of their favorite stuffed animals. He then gave children a simple choice about which one they wanted to take home: the original or the duplicate. It wasn’t even close. Despite being physically identical, the replicas were seen as deeply inferior, devoid of the original’s spirit. Almost unanimously, the children selected the original.
Psychologists reason that these essentialist tendencies are very important from a developmental perspective of human nature. They help the young brain categorize the objects in their environments, and help build strong, robust concepts. Your Mom doesn’t cease being your Mom just because she got a new haircut, or is wearing unfamiliar lipstick. Our brain creates a broad concept of “Mom”, which doesn’t change as these simple physical attributes do.
As we age, we get more sophisticated in our thinking. However, essentialism remains throughout our lifetimes. At one level, our brains know that objects in the world are simply that – simple, physical objects. But on another level, these simple objects take on an exceptional quality. We see them as having a deeper, hidden soul.
So how can this be applied in marketing?
Infusing Hidden Meaning With Storytelling
At its core, an object’s spirit is a belief – whether real or imagined – about its history. Naturally then, as certain things acquire an exciting history, their spirit, and therefore their value, increases dramatically. Research indicates that the slow accumulation of history is great for mementos and heritage products. But clearly, not all companies have the luxury of waiting around for these events to naturally transpire.
Thankfully, there’s another technique that can be just as powerful: storytelling. What’s the difference between an ordinary object and a valuable treasure? The story.
One of the best examples of this comes from research on the Significant Objects Project. A team of anthropologists tested the impact of stories by purchasing a series of ordinary objects such as cups, binders, and Pez dispensers. These objects were as bland and simple as possible, and the average price for each was $1.25. Then came the storytelling. They called up a few friends who happened to be writers and had them make up a unique story for each of these objects. They then re-auctioned the items on eBay and included these stories in the product description. Each object now had a hidden lifeblood.
The average price for each object went from $1.25 to well over $100! Not a bad return on investment.
Stories are powerful. But they don’t just impact economics. Research indicates that they profoundly impact our raw experience of pleasure. This proves especially true in the domain of taste, where our perception is especially prone to suggestion. Imagine being at a nice restaurant, about to dig into a delicious plate of seafood that the waiter has just sent down. But before you do, the chef comes out and shares the inspiration behind it: She tells you about her childhood, growing up near the coast, and how it gave her a lifelong obsession with the sea.
What the chef has just done is instill the dish with an essence. Research has found that patrons enjoy this kind of storytelling and that it enhances the dining experience. Similar research has found similar effects for wine as well. A glass of wine poured from the same bottle tastes reliably better if you’re told it comes from a region with a strong reputation for wine, such as Northern California, instead of a place that doesn’t, such as North Dakota.
When done right, a little storytelling can go a long way.
Final Thoughts
Humans are strange, quirky creatures. When evaluating the products we interact with, we don’t just go off the simple sensory features – how it looks, feels, or tastes. Instead, we see into the object’s soul. As discussed in Branding That Means Business, this is a quirky element of our psychology that leads to a fascinating array of marketing opportunities.
The spirit of a product comes down to its story. Histories accumulate naturally through time and, as we’ve seen, are galvanized through things like celebrity ownership. And thankfully for practitioners, they can do more than simply wait in the front row of a Britney concert.
Through clever storytelling, they can actively shape a product’s soul. And in doing so, significantly enhance its value.
This article was edited by Lachezar Ivanov.
