Working at the crossroads of storytelling, marketing and digital communications is an exciting place to be. It used to be that you would tell a good story and then have the satisfaction of the audience as the reward. (I still love getting paid this way, but it doesn’t do much if you have to run a business)

The first generation of digital marketing experiments did little more than replicate TV and print techniques, but as the social web develops I am seeing an explosion of storytelling experiments that are much more grounded in a fundamental understanding of human beings’ connections to stories.

The true value of an object

A recent exciting discovery for me was this project that combined found objects, a well crafted story about the object, and Ebay. The goal of the project was to see what effect a good story would have on the eventual sales price of a random object.

Hundreds of objects were paired with a great story, some quite odd and amusing, and none of them were overt sales pitches. Each one imbued the object with more meaning and more value, and every single object ended up selling at huge increase from where it started.

The inflated price of a shaving mug

The relatively forgettable shaving mug pictured above shot up in price by 1500% thanks to the story that accompanied it on Ebay. An excerpt of that story is below:

There are other shaving mugs that resemble this one, but none was created as this one was: by hand, with the assistance of a kiln, by a famous surrealist sculptor. This one was. In fact, it was wheel-thrown and fired by the Belgian artist Paul Coppens in 1932; Coppens, of course, was part of the group of artists supported by the patronage of Edward James. “I have dreamed of a smiling shaving mug,” Coppens wrote to James in June 1932. “A sketch is attached. It looks like a face, of course, because a face is the only thing that is capable of smiling (or is it?), but it also looks like a tooth, because a tooth is the only thing that is capable of showing when a face is smiling. In addition, I have noticed that daily washing rituals, including shaving, are illogically equated with the whiteness of teeth. But there is more to the image. Look at the handle. It functions like an ear visually, but as there is only one, this figure is incapable of ‘smiling ear-to-ear,’ as the idiom has it. In addition, I have recently learned that ‘mug’ is a slang term for the human face in some parts of the English-speaking world. (Ironically, this practice comes from the fact that beer steins were fashioned in the human image, and unattractive specimens of our race were said be ‘mug-faces.’)” Coppens’ piece, which he called Tooth Fils (the wordplay refers both to dentistry and to its small size), was part of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936.

Learn more about the storytelling experiment here at Significant Objects