“It’s the Story, Stupid”
The children and I have been watching American Idol together and I have pointed out to them how it is not just the song that sells the singer, but the story. That is, there are thousands of contestants across the country who can hit a wide range of notes, stay in tune and choose a good song for their voice. But Fox distinguishes their contestants by the back stories they feature. They are trying to sell us “likability”. And so it is, we have stories of what people have suffered and the challenges they face: “In our next episode, we’ll meet a divorced father of fifteen who had to get a tracheotomy after ingesting a chicken bone while performing CPR for a fellow diner at a Chinese buffet. You won’t want to miss this.”
This is not unexpected, of course. The advertising industry has been doing this for years. Alan Schwartz says in The Paradox of Choice:
The point of advertising is to sell brands. According to James Twitchell, the key insight that has shaped modern advertising came to cigarette manufacturers in the 1930s. In the course of market research, they discovered that smokers who taste-tested various cigarette brands without knowing which was which couldn’t tell them apart. So, if the manufacturer wanted to sell more of his particular brand, he was either going to have to make it distinctive or make consumers think it was distinctive, which was considerably easier. With that was born the practice of selling a product by associating with a glamorous lifestyle.”
