داستان‌ها

1. Stories

The war had raged for ten long years, with no finish in sight. According to legend, Odysseus devised a cunning plan to end the fruitless siege. The Greeks built a giant wooden horse and hid their best warriors inside. The rest of their army then sailed away, pretending to return to their homeland and leaving the monumental horse behind on the beach.

The Trojans found the horse and dragged it into Troy as a symbol of their victory. They tied ropes around the beast’s neck and dozens of men set huge log rollers underneath the wooden body to pull it slowly up from the beach. Others worked to take down the gate so that the monstrous sculpture could be dragged inside the city walls.

Once the statue was inside, the Trojans celebrated the end of the decade-long conflict. They decorated the temples with greenery, unearthed the jugs of sacrificial wine, and danced to rejoice at the conclusion of their ordeal.

But that night, while the city lay unconscious in drunken slumber, the Greeks sprang from their hiding place. They slid to the ground, silenced the sentries, and opened the huge gates to the city. The rest of the Greek army sailed back under the cover of darkness and soon joined them, easily walking through the very gates they had fruitlessly assaulted for so many years.

The city was able to stand a decade of battle, but it could not withstand an attack from within. Once inside, the Greeks destroyed the town, decisively ending the Trojan War.

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The story of the Trojan Horse has been passed on for thousands of years. Scientists and historians estimate that the battle took place around 1170 BC, but the story was not written down until many years later. For centuries the tale was transmitted orally as an epic poem, spoken or sung to music.

The story reads like a modern-day reality show. It’s full of twists and turns that include personal vendettas, adultery, and double crosses. Through a potent mixture of drama, romance, and action, it holds listeners’ interest.

But the story of the Trojan Horse also carries an underlying message: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” A more general interpretation would be “never trust your enemies, even when they seem friendly.” In fact it is exactly when they are making such overtures that you should be especially suspicious. So the tale of the Trojan Horse is more than just an entertaining story. It also teaches an important lesson.

Still, if Homer and Virgil had simply wanted to teach people a lesson, couldn’t they have done it more efficiently? Couldn’t they have gotten right to the point rather than writing an epic poem with hundreds of lines of poetry?

Of course. But would the lesson have had the same impact? Probably not.

By encasing the lesson in a story, these early writers ensured that it would be passed along—and perhaps even be believed more wholeheartedly than if the lesson’s words were spoken simply and plainly. That’s because people don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.

STORIES AS VESSELS

Stories are the original form of entertainment. Imagine you were a Greek citizen in 1000 BC. There was no Internet. No SportsCenter or six o’clock news. No radio or newspapers. So if you wanted entertainment, stories were the way to get it. The Trojan Horse, The Odyssey, and other famous tales were the entertainment of the day. People would gather round a fire, or sit in an amphitheater, to hear these epic narratives told again and again.

Narratives are inherently more engrossing than basic facts. They have a beginning, middle, and end. If people get sucked in early, they’ll stay for the conclusion. When you hear people tell a good story you hang on every word. You want to find out whether they missed the plane or what they did with a house full of screaming nine year olds. You started down a path and you want to know how it ends. Until it does, they’ve captured your attention.

Today there are thousands of entertainment options, but our tendency to tell stories remains. We get together around our proverbial campfires—now water coolers or girls’/guys’ night out—and tell stories. About ourselves and the things that have happened to us lately. About our friends and other people we know.

People tell stories for the same reasons they share word of mouth. Some narratives are about Social Currency. People tell the story of going through the phone booth to get into Please Don’t Tell because it makes them look cool and in the know. Other stories are driven by (high arousal) Emotion. People tell the story of Will It Blend? because they are amazed that a blender could shred marbles or an iPhone. Practical Value also plays a role. People share the story of how their neighbor’s dogs got sick after eating a certain type of chew toy because they want your dog to avoid the same fate.

People are so used to telling stories that they create narratives even when they don’t actually need to. Take online reviews. They’re supposed to be about product features. How well a new digital camera worked and whether the zoom is as good as the company suggests. But this mostly informational content often ends up being embedded in a background narrative.

My son just turned eight so we were planning our first trip to Disney World last July. We needed a digital camera to capture the experience so bought this one because my friend recommended it. The zoom was great. We could easily get sharp pictures of Cinderella’s Castle even from far away.

We’re so used to telling stories that we do it even when a simple rating or opinion would have sufficed.

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Just like the Trojan Horse itself, stories are more than they seem. Sure, the outward shell of a story—we could call this the surface plot—grabs your attention and engages your interest. But peel back that exterior, and you’ll usually find something hidden inside. Underneath the star-crossed lovers and thundering heroes there is usually something else being conveyed.

Stories carry things. A lesson or moral. Information or a take-home message. Take the famous story “The Three Little Pigs.” Three brothers leave home to head into the world to seek their fortune. The first little pig quickly builds his house out of straw. The second pig uses sticks. Both throw their houses together as quickly as possible so they can hang out and play the rest of the day. The third pig, however, is more disciplined. He takes the time and effort to carefully build his house out of bricks, even while his brothers have fun around him.

One night, a big bad wolf comes along looking for something to eat. He goes to the first pig’s house and says those words so beloved by small children: “Little pig, little pig, let me in.” But when the pig says no, the wolf blows the pig’s house down. He does the same to the house of sticks. But when the wolf tries the same thing at the third pig’s house, it doesn’t work. He huffs and he puffs but the wolf can’t destroy the third pig’s house because it’s made of bricks.

And that’s the moral of the story. Effort pays off. Take the time to do something right. You might not have as much fun right away, but you’ll find that it’s worth it in the end.

Lessons or morals are also embedded in thousands of other fairy tales, fables, and urban legends. “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” warns about the dangers of lying. “Cinderella” shows that being good to others pays off. Shakespeare’s plays carry valuable lessons about character and relationships, power and madness, love and war. These are complex lessons, but they are instructive nevertheless.

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The ordinary stories we tell one another every day also carry information.

Take the story of the coat my cousin bought from Lands’ End. He’d moved from California to the East Coast a couple of years ago, and in preparation for his first real winter he went to a fancy department store and bought a nice topcoat. The coat was one of those three-quarter-length wool varieties that men often wear over suits. It fitted well, the color was perfect, and my cousin felt like a dapper English gentleman.

There was only one problem. It wasn’t warm enough. It was great when the temperature outside was in the fifties and even the forties, but once the temperature got down to the thirties the cold seeped right through the coat into my cousin’s bones.

After one winter of looking great but freezing every day on his way to work, he decided it was time to get a real winter coat. He even decided to go whole hog and get one of those goose-down numbers that make you look as if you’re wearing a sleeping bag—the kind of coat that is ubiquitous in the East and Midwest but never seen in California. So he went online, found a great deal at Lands’ End, and bought a down commuter coat rated to minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Warm enough to withstand even the coldest East Coast winter.

My cousin really liked the coat, and indeed it was super warm. But halfway through the season he broke the zipper. Ripped it right off the lining. He was devastated. He had just bought the coat a few months before and it was broken already. How much would it cost to have it fixed? And how long would he have to wait to get it back from being repaired?

It was mid-January, not a very ideal time to be walking around without a winter coat.

So he called Lands’ End. How much will it cost to repair, he asked, and how long will it take to be fixed?

My cousin braced for the icy reply he was used to getting from customer service people. It always seems to be the customer’s problem. So sorry to hear the product broke or the service isn’t working, customer service people usually say, but unfortunately it’s not our fault. It’s outside the warranty or you tried to do something beyond the normal use. But we’d be happy to repair it for twice the cost of the product or send someone out to check on it. Just as long as you can stay home from work for the three-hour window during which we may or may not show up. Oh, and by the way, the script the brand consultants wrote reminds us to tell you that we really appreciate your business.

But to his surprise, the Lands’ End customer service person said something entirely different. “Repair?” she asked. “We’ll just send you a new one in the mail.” “How much will that cost?” my cousin asked nervously. “It’s free,” she replied, “and we’ll send it out two-day mail so you don’t have to wait. It’s too cold this winter to go out with a broken coat.” A free replacement sent right away if a product breaks? Wow! That’s almost unheard of in this day and age of “the customer is always wrong.” Remarkable customer service. Customer service the way it is supposed to be. My cousin was so impressed he just had to tell me what happened.

My cousin’s experience makes for a nice story, but when you look closer there is also a huge amount of useful information hidden in the narrative: (1) Topcoats look great but aren’t really warm enough for a bitter East Coast winter. (2) Down coats make you look like a mummy, but they’re worth getting if you want to stay warm. (3) Lands’ End makes a really warm winter coat. (4) It also has outstanding customer service. (5) If something goes wrong, Lands’ End will fix it. These are just a handful of the nuggets of knowledge woven into a deceptively simple story.

The same is true for most stories people tell us. How we avoided the traffic jam or how the dry cleaner was able to take our oil-splattered white shirt and make it look like new. These stories contain helpful information: a good route to take if the highway is blocked; a great dry cleaner if you need to get out tough stains.

Stories, then, can act as vessels, carriers that help transmit information to others.

LEARNING THROUGH STORIES

Stories are an important source of cultural learning that help us make sense of the world. At a high level, this learning can be about the rules and standards of a group or society. How should a good employee behave? What does it mean to be a moral person? Or on a more basic level: who’s a good mechanic who won’t overcharge?

Beyond stories, think about other ways that people could acquire this information. Trial and error might work, but it would be extremely costly and time-consuming. Imagine if finding an honest mechanic required taking your car to two dozen different places around town and getting work done at each one. It would be exhausting (and expensive).

Alternatively, people could try direct observation, but that’s also tough. You’d have to cozy up to the mechanics in all the different shops and convince them to let you watch what they did and tell you how much they charged. Guess how well that would work.

Finally, people could get their information from advertisements. But ads aren’t always trustworthy, and people are generally skeptical of persuasion attempts. Most ads for mechanics will say they have great prices and do good work, but without really checking, it’s hard to know for sure.

Stories solve this problem. They provide a quick and easy way for people to acquire lots of knowledge in a vivid and engaging fashion. One good story about a mechanic who fixed the problem without charging is worth dozens of observations and years of trial and error. Stories save time and hassle and give people the information they need in a way that’s easy to remember.

You can think of stories as providing proof by analogy. There is no way to be sure that if I buy something from Lands’ End, I’ll get the same wonderful customer service my cousin received. But the mere fact that it happened to someone who is like me makes me feel that there is a pretty good chance it will happen to me too.

People are also less likely to argue against stories than against advertising claims. Lands’ End representatives could tell us that they have great customer service, but as we discussed earlier, the fact that they are trying to sell something makes it difficult to believe them. It’s harder to argue with personal stories.

First, it’s hard to disagree with a specific thing that happened to a specific person. What is someone going to tell my cousin, “No, I think you’re lying, there’s no way Lands’ End would be that nice”? Hardly.

Second, we’re so caught up in the drama of what happened to so-and-so that we don’t have the cognitive resources to disagree. We’re so engaged in following the narrative that we don’t have the energy to question what is being said. So in the end, we’re much more likely to be persuaded.

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People don’t like to seem like walking advertisements. The Subway sandwich chain offers seven subs with less than six grams of fat. But no one is going to walk up to a friend and just spit out that information. Not only would it be weird, it would be out of context. Sure, this information is practically valuable if someone is trying to lose weight, but unless weight loss is the topic of conversation, or the situation triggers people to think about ways to lose weight, they’re not going to bring it up. So the fact that Subway has a bunch of low-fat options may not be brought up that often.

Contrast that with the Jared story. Jared Fogle lost 245 pounds eating Subway sandwiches. Bad eating habits and lack of exercise led Jared to balloon to 425 pounds in college. He was so heavy that he picked his courses based on whether the classroom had large-enough seats for him to be comfortable rather than whether he liked the material.

But after his roommate pointed out that his health was getting worse, Jared decided to take action. So he started a “Subway diet”: almost every day he ate a foot-long veggie sub for lunch and a six-inch turkey sub for dinner. After three months of this self-imposed regimen he had lost almost 100 pounds.

But he didn’t stop there. Jared kept up his diet. Soon his pants size had dropped from an enormous sixty inches to a normal thirty-four-inch waist. He lost all that weight and had Subway to thank.

The Jared story is so entertaining that people bring it up even when they’re not talking about weight loss. The amount of weight he lost is impressive, but even more astonishing is the fact that he lost it eating Subway sandwiches. A guy loses 245 pounds eating fast food? The summary alone is enough to draw people in.

The story gets shared for many of the reasons we talked about in prior chapters. It’s remarkable (Social Currency), evokes surprise and amazement (Emotion), and provides useful information about healthy fast food (Practical Value).

People don’t talk about Jared because they want to help Subway, but Subway still benefits because it is part of the narrative. Listeners learn about Jared, but they also learn about Subway along the way. They learn that (1) while Subway might seem like fast food, it actually offers a number of healthy options. (2) So healthy that someone could lose weight by eating them. (3) A lot of weight. Further, (4) someone could eat mostly Subway sandwiches for three months and still come back for more. So the food must be pretty tasty. Listeners learn all this about Subway, even though people tell the story because of Jared.

And that is the magic of stories. Information travels under the guise of what seems like idle chatter.

BUILD A TROJAN HORSE

Stories thus give people an easy way to talk about products and ideas. Subway might have low-fat subs, and Lands’ End might have great customer service, but outside of triggers in a conversation, people need a reason to bring that information up. And good stories provide that reason. They provide a sort of psychological cover that allows people to talk about a product or idea without seeming like an advertisement.

So how can we use stories to get people talking?

We need to build our own Trojan Horse—a carrier narrative that people will share, while talking about our product or idea along the way.

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Tim Piper never had a sister. And he grew up going to an all-boys school. So he had always thought it was a little ridiculous that so many of his girlfriends had beauty issues. They were always worried that their hair was too straight, their eyes were too light, or their complexion wasn’t clear enough. Piper didn’t get it. They seemed pretty enough to him.

But after interviewing dozens of girls, Piper started to realize that the media were to blame. Advertising, and the media in general, taught young women that something was wrong with them. That they needed fixing. And after years of being bombarded with those messages, women started to believe them.

What would help women realize that these ads were fake? That the images being shown didn’t reflect reality?

One night his girlfriend at the time was putting on makeup to go out when it hit him. He realized that girls needed to be exposed to the before before the after. What models look like before the makeup and hair styling and retouching and Photoshop swoop in to make them “perfect.” So he created a short film.

Stephanie stares into the camera and nods her head to the crew that she is ready to begin. She is pretty, but not in a way that would make her stand out in a crowd. Her hair is dark blond, feathered, and relatively straight. Her skin is nice but a few blemishes mar it here and there. She looks as though she could be anyone—your neighbor, your friend, your daughter.

A bright light turns on, and the process begins. As we watch, makeup artists darken Stephanie’s eyes and highlight her lips with gloss. They apply foundation to her skin and blush to color her cheeks. They groom her eyebrows and lengthen her lashes. They curl and tease and style her hair.

Then the photographer appears with his camera. He takes dozens of photos. Fans are turned on so her hair appears naturally tousled. Stephanie alternately smiles and stares provocatively at the camera. Finally, the photographer gets a shot he likes.

But getting the perfect snapshot is only the beginning. Next comes the Photoshopping. Stephanie’s image is fed into a computer, and begins to morph before our eyes. Her lips are inflated. Her neck is thinned and lengthened. Her eyes are enlarged. These are only a handful of the dozens of changes that are made.

You are now gazing at a snapshot of a supermodel. As the camera pans backward, you can see that the image has been placed on a billboard for a makeup campaign. The screen fades to black, and small words appear in white writing. “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.” Wow. This is a powerful clip. A great reminder of all that really goes on behind the scenes in the beauty industry.

But in addition to being a great conversation piece, it’s also a clever Trojan Horse for Dove products.

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The media in general, and the beauty industry in particular, tend to paint a skewed picture of women. Models are usually tall and skinny. Magazines show women with flawless complexions and perfect teeth. Ads scream that their products can transform you into a better you. Younger face, fuller lips, softer skin.

Not surprisingly, these messages have a hugely negative impact on how women see themselves. Only 2 percent of women describe themselves as beautiful. More than two-thirds believe that the media has set an unrealistic standard of beauty that they’ll never be able to achieve. No matter how hard they try. This feeling of not living up to expectations even affects young girls. Dark-haired girls wish they were blond. Redheads hate their freckles.

Piper’s video, entitled “Evolution,” gives a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making the images we are bombarded with every day. It reminds people that these stunning-looking women are not real. They are fantasies, fictions only loosely based on actual people. Concocted using all the magic that digital editing can provide. The clip is as raw and shocking as it is thought provoking.

But the film wasn’t sponsored by concerned citizens or an industry watchdog group. Piper made the film in coordination with Dove, maker of health and beauty products, as part of its “Campaign for Real Beauty.” This was Dove’s effort to celebrate the natural physical variations we all have and then to inspire women to be confident and comfortable with themselves. Another ad for soap featured real women of all shapes and sizes, rather than the rail-thin models people are used to seeing.

Not surprisingly, the campaign sparked a great deal of discussion. What does it mean to be beautiful? How are the media shaping these perceptions? What can we do to make it better?

The campaign created more than just controversy. In addition to making the issue more Public, and giving people an excuse to talk about a topic that would have otherwise been private, the campaign also got them thinking, and talking, about Dove.

The company was commended for using real people in its campaigns and for getting people to talk about this complicated but important issue. And “Evolution,” which cost only a little over one hundred thousand dollars to make, got more than 16 million views. It netted the company hundreds of millions of dollars in exposure. The clip won numerous industry awards and more than tripled the website traffic the company received from Dove’s 2006 Super Bowl ad. Dove experienced double-digit sales growth.

“Evolution” was widely shared because Dove latched onto something people already wanted to talk about: unrealistic beauty norms. It’s a highly emotional issue, but something so controversial that people might have been afraid to bring up otherwise. “Evolution” brought it out in the open. It let people air their grievances and think about solutions. And along the way the brand benefited. Dove got people talking by starting a conversation about beauty norms—but the brand was smuggled in as part of the discussion. By creating an emotional story, Dove created a vessel that carried its brand along for the ride.

And that brings us to the story of Ron Bensimhon.

MAKING VIRALITY VALUABLE

On August 16, 2004, Canadian Ron Bensimhon carefully shed his warm-up pants and stepped to the edge of the three-meter springboard. He had attempted dives from this height many times before, but never during an event of this magnitude. It was the Athens Olympics. The world’s biggest stage for sport and the pinnacle of athletic competition. But Ron did not seem fazed. He shook off the jitters and raised his hands high above his head. As the crowd roared, he leapt off the end of the board and completed a full belly flop.

A belly flop? In the Olympics? Surely Ron must have been devastated. But as he emerged from the water he seemed calm, happy even. He swam around for a few moments, hamming it up for the audience and then slowly swam to the side of the pool, where he was met by a platoon of Olympic officials and security guards.

Ron had broken into the Olympics. He wasn’t actually on the Canadian swim team. In fact, he wasn’t an Olympic athlete at all. He was the self-proclaimed most famous streaker in the world, and he had crashed the Olympics as part of a publicity stunt.

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When Ron jumped off the springboard, he wasn’t naked, but he wasn’t wearing swim trunks either. He wore a blue tutu and white polka dot tights. And emblazoned across his chest was the name of an Internet casino, GoldenPalace.com.

This wasn’t the first Golden Palace publicity stunt (though the company did say that Ron’s stunt was done without its knowledge). In 2004 it bid $28,000 on eBay for a grilled cheese sandwich that some people believed displayed an image of the Virgin Mary. In 2005 it gave a woman $15,000 to change her name to GoldenPalace.com. But the stunt with the “fool in the pool,” as Bensimhon has been called, was one of the biggest. Millions of people were watching, and the story got picked up by news outlets around the world. It also got a huge amount of word-of-mouth chatter. Someone crashing the Olympics and diving into a pool in a tutu? What a story. Pretty remarkable.

But as the days ticked by, people didn’t talk about the casino. Sure, some people who saw Bensimhon’s jump went to the website to try to figure out what was going on. But most people who shared the story talked about the stunt, not the website. They talked about whether the interruption threw off the Chinese divers, who flubbed their final dive right after the trick and lost the gold medal. They talked about security at the Olympics and how someone could slip through so easily at such a major event. And they talked about Bensimhon’s trial and whether he would serve jail time.

What they didn’t talk about was GoldenPalace.com. Why?

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Marketing experts talk about “the fool in the pool” as one of the worst guerrilla marketing failures of all time. Usually they deride it for having disrupted the competition and ruining the moment for athletes who had trained all their lives. They also point out that it led to Bensimhon being arrested and fined. These are all good reasons to consider Bensimhon’s belly flop, well, a flop.

But I’d like to add another one to the list. The stunt had nothing to do with the product it was trying to promote.

Yes, people talked about the stunt, but they didn’t talk about the casino. Polka dot tights, tutus, and breaking into the Olympics to dive into a pool are all great story material. That’s why people talked about them. So if the goal was to get people to think more about security at the Olympics or get attention for a new style of tights, the stunt succeeded.

But it had nothing to do with casinos. Not even in the slightest.

So people talked about the remarkable story but left the casino out because it was irrelevant. They might have mentioned that Bensimhon was sponsored by someone but didn’t mention the casino either because it was so irrelevant that they forgot, or because it didn’t make the story any better. It’s like building a magnificent Trojan Horse but forgetting to put anything inside.

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When trying to generate word of mouth, many people forget one important detail. They focus so much on getting people to talk that they ignore the part that really matters: what people are talking about.

That’s the problem with creating content that is unrelated to the product or idea it is meant to promote. There’s a big difference between people talking about content and people talking about the company, organization, or person that created that content.

Evian’s famous “Roller Babies” video had the same problem. The clip shows what appear to be diaper-wearing babies doing tricks on roller skates. They jump over one another, hop over fences, and do synchronized moves, all to the beat of the song “Rapper’s Delight.” The babies’ bodies are clearly animated, but their faces look real, making the video remarkable to watch. The video got more than 50 million views, and Guinness World Records declared it the most viewed online advertisement in history.

But while you might think that all this attention would benefit the brand, it didn’t. That same year Evian lost market share and sales dropped almost 25 percent.

The problem? Roller-skating babies are cute, but they have nothing to do with Evian. So people shared the clip, but that didn’t benefit the brand.

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The key, then, is to not only make something viral, but also make it valuable to the sponsoring company or organization. Not just virality but valuable virality.

Take Barclay Prime’s hundred-dollar cheesesteak that we talked about at the beginning of the book. Compared with dancing babies and bottled water, an expensive, high-end cheesesteak and an expensive, high-end steak restaurant are clearly more related. And the item wasn’t just a stunt, it was an actual option on Barclay’s menu. Further, it directly spoke to the inferences the restaurant wanted consumers to make about its food: high quality but not stuffy, lavish but creative.

Virality is most valuable when the brand or product benefit is integral to the story. When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it.

One of my favorite examples of valuable virality comes from the Egyptian dairy company Panda, which makes a variety of different cheese products.

The commercials always start innocuously: workers talking about what to have for lunch, or a hospital nurse checking in on a patient. In one spot a father is grocery shopping with his son. “Dad, why don’t we get some Panda cheese?” the son asks as they walk by the dairy aisle. “Enough!” the father replies. “We have enough stuff in the cart already.” Then the panda appears. Or rather, a man in a panda suit. There’s simply no way to describe adequately the ludicrousness of this moment. Yes, a giant panda is suddenly standing in the middle of a grocery store. Or in a different commercial, an office. Or in another, a medical clinic.

In the grocery-store video, the father and son stare at the panda, obviously dumbfounded. As a Buddy Holly tune plays, the boy and his father look at the Panda cheese on the shelf, then back to the panda. And back and forth again. The father gulps.

Then, pandemonium ensues (excuse the pun).

The panda slowly walks toward the shopping cart, calmly places both hands on its sides, and flips it over.

Food flies all over the aisle—pasta, canned goods, and liquids everywhere. The stare-down continues as the father and the panda stand on opposite ends of the cart. A long pause ensues. Then the panda kicks the overturned food for good measure. “Never say no to Panda,” a voice intones as a panda hand flashes the product on the screen.

The commercial and others like it are impeccably timed and utterly hilarious. I’ve shown them to everyone from college kids to financial service executives and everyone laughs until their sides hurt.

But note that what makes these videos so great is not just that they’re funny. The commercial would have been just as funny if the guy was dressed in a chicken suit or if the tagline was, “Never say no to Jim’s used cars.” Someone dressed in an animal suit kicking groceries is funny regardless of which animal it is or what product it’s for.

They’re successful—and great examples of valuable virality—because the brand is an integral part of the stories. Mentioning the panda is a natural part of the conversation. In fact, you’d have to try pretty hard not to mention the panda and still have the story make sense (much less get people to understand why it’s funny). So the best part of the story and the brand name are perfectly intertwined. That increases the chance not only that people telling the story will talk about Panda the brand, but also that they will remember what product the commercial is for, days or even weeks later. Panda is part and parcel of the story. It’s an essential part of the narrative.

The same can be said for Blendtec’s Will It Blend? campaign. It’s impossible to tell the story of the clips where the blender tears through an iPhone without talking about a blender. And without recognizing that the Blendtec blender in the videos must be extremely tough—so strong that it can blend almost anything. Which is exactly what Blendtec wants to communicate.

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In trying to craft contagious content, valuable virality is critical. That means making the idea or desired benefit a key part of the narrative. It’s like the plot of a good detective story. Some details are critical to the narrative and some are extraneous. Where were the different suspects at the time of the murder? Critical. What was the detective eating for dinner while he mulled over the details of the case? Not so important.

The same distinction can be applied to the content we’ve been discussing. Take Ron Bensimhon’s Olympic stunt. Jumping into a pool? Critical. GoldenPalace.com? Pretty much irrelevant.

The importance of these different types of details becomes even clearer when people retell the story. Think about the story of the Trojan Horse. It has survived for thousands of years. There is a written account of the story, but most of the details people know come from hearing someone else talk about it. But which details people remember and retell? It isn’t random. Critical details stick around, while irrelevant ones drop out.

Psychologists Gordon Allport and Joseph Postman examined a similar issue more than fifty years ago. They were keenly interested in what happened to rumors as they spread from person to person. Did the stories stay the same as they were transmitted or did they change? And if they changed, were there predictable patterns in how rumors evolved?

To address this question, they had people play what most of us would describe as a game of Telephone.

First, someone was shown a picture of a detailed situation—in one case, a group of people on a subway car. The car appears to be an Eighth Avenue Express and it is going past Dyckman Street. There are various advertisements posted on the car, and five people are seated, including a rabbi and a mother carrying her baby. But the focus of the picture is two men having an argument. They are standing up, and one is pointing at the other and holding a knife.

Then the game of Telephone starts. The first person (transmitter) is asked to describe the picture to someone else (receiver), who cannot see it. The transmitter conveys the various details as he sees fit. The transmitter then leaves the room and a new person enters. That new person becomes the receiver, and the original receiver becomes the transmitter, sharing what happened in the image with the new receiver, who also hasn’t seen the image. Then the original receiver leaves the room, a new person enters, and the game is repeated to a fourth, fifth, and eventually sixth person. Allport and Postman then looked at which story details persisted along the transmission chain.

They found that the amount of information shared dropped dramatically each time the rumor was shared. Around 70 percent of the story details were lost in the first five to six transmissions.

But the stories didn’t just become shorter: they were also sharpened around the main point or key details. Across dozens of transmission chains there were common patterns. Certain details were consistently left out and certain details were consistently retained. In the story about the subway car the first person telling the story mentioned all the details. They talked about how the subway car seemed to be an Eighth Avenue Express, how it was going past Dyckman Street, and how there were a number of people on it, two of them arguing.

But as the story was passed on down the telephone line, many of the unimportant details got stripped out. People stopped talking about what type of subway it was or where it was traveling and instead focused on the argument. The fact that one person was pointing at the other and brandishing a knife. Just as in the detective story, people mentioned the critical details and left out the extraneous ones.

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If you want to craft contagious content, try to build your own Trojan Horse. But make sure you think about valuable virality. Make sure the information you want people to remember and transmit is critical to the narrative. Sure, you can make your narrative funny, surprising, or entertaining. But if people don’t connect the content back to you, it’s not going to help you very much. Even if it goes viral.

So build a Social Currency–laden, Triggered, Emotional, Public, Practically Valuable Trojan Horse, but don’t forget to hide your message inside. Make sure your desired information is so embedded into the plot that people can’t tell the story without it.