We’re always talking about how important a story is in marketing — but now someone has finally proven it with an ingenious experiment.

As summarised in a recent DoubleThink post, the experiment (by New York Times columnist Rob Walker) is called Significant Objects and the idea is really simple:

• 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

So, what’s a story worth? Quite a lot as it happens. The first 100 objects sold were bought for $120 and sold for $3,612 — a markup of 2,776%. The video of Rob Walker presenting the experiment at the PSFK conference is here.

And take a few minutes to browse around DoubleThink, an excellent blog on ‘Insight, Analytics and new Marketing’  by Dimitri Maex and Colin Mitchell, top strategists at Ogilvy.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, analytics, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Copywriting, insight

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