An important function of advertising and marketing is the ability to attach a story to a product, in order to capture the imagination of the prospective consumer.
Luxury goods and services, more than their mainstream equivalents, have a particular need to create powerful narratives that will elevate the products to the level of symbolic artifacts. They need to create dreams, to elevate, and to transport the consumer. They need to be receptacles of as much meaning as possible.
Anyone working in the luxury industry benefits from an ability to contemplate their products and services from this point of view. One of the workshops that we often do with clients is to treat products as objects of meditation. By doing this, we can derive new narratives out of the meanings that can be projected on to the products.
And for those who are interested in this approach, we often use the Significant Objects project as a parallel example.
Curated by New York Times journalist and author Rob Walker, and Joshua Glenn, Significant Objects takes thrift store objects and pairs them with writers to invent stories about them. They then publish the stories and sell the objects – now with added narrative! – on eBay.
In each case the opening price of each object is the free-market value of the object prior to its invented significance. So it’s even possible to plot the percentage value of the narrative… What they have discovered, so far, is that on an original aggregate cost of $112, the aggregate of sales – with added narrative – is $2,857; representing a ‘narrative mark-up’ of 2,450%. A fairly unscientific, but compelling piece of data.
The idea came to Rob Walker while he was writing his book, Buying In, which deals with the relationship consumers and the products they consume.
“While doing the book I was thinking a lot about what makes a thing matter, and I sort of end the book on the idea that it has more to do with personal narrative than anything else–the meaning comes from us, not the object. So that led to ‘Well, what if you made up a narrative, or got great fiction writers to do so?’… It ends up making people think about value and objects in a new way.”
For anyone working with luxury brands, Significant Objects is a good place to begin to think about the narratives, emotions, and meanings that can be attached to products.
Join Significant Objects on Facebook
Visit the Significant Objects website
Read the stories, buy the Significant Objects