Back when Jim Morrison and The Doors released their first album, they were a bunch of movie school bums whose biggest ambition was to become as big as the cult LA band Love.
Who remembers Love today? Not many. But hundreds of millions know Jim Morrison and Doors hits like “Light My Fire” and “Hello, I Love You.”
This global success might never have happened. But The Doors, bums that they were, spent weeks calling up the local LA radio station, requesting that cool new song, Light My Fire.
The song eventually became a local hit… then a national hit… then the album became a hit… and then The Doors became the next big thing.
Maybe you can do the same. At least that’s one conclusion I drew from a mind-opening article by Duncan Watts.
The article is titled “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” You can find it on The New York Times Magazine site, and it’s worth reading from beginning to end. But if you’re pressed for time or attention, let me summarize it for you:
Conventional wisdom says the success of a book or a song or a movie is based on two things. One is the product itself. The other is what the market wants at that time.
And the conclusion, based on this conventional wisdom, is simple. If anybody fails to predict what will become successful, he is either too dumb or too lazy to read the writing on the wall.
Well, Watts had his doubts about this. So he set up a clever experiment to test it out. I won’t rehash the full details of how the experiment ran. The gist was it involved looking at which songs became popular among nine different segments of 14,000 people.
People in one segment had no information about how popular each song already was. People in the other eight segments knew how popular each song was, but only within their own segment.
This setup allowed Watts to test two ideas:
1. The most popular songs will be roughly as popular in the different segments.
2. The same songs will float to the top in the different segments.
Both of these hypotheses turned out to be very false.
First, in the eight “social influence” segments, the most popular songs became way more popular than in the “no social influence” segment. And the losers were more thorough losers.
Maybe that’s not so amazing. But get this:
In the different “social influence” segments, different songs became the most popular. And this wasn’t a minor reordering. A song could be no. 1 in one segment and no. 40 in another.
Watts explains this in a blindingly obvious way:
People do not make decisions independently of other people. The world is too complex… we usually don’t know what we want… and we often get more value out of a shared experience than out of the “best” experience.
All this means that small, random differences in initial popularity can have a massive impact in what becomes a hit and what doesn’t. That’s what Watts calls cumulative advantage. The rich get richer. And who gets rich initially? Well, that’s a coin toss.
This explains my Grinch story from yesterday. Chuck Jones had to pitch the Grinch 25 times, not because industry experts are too dumb or closed-minded to see the potential that was there… but because it’s genuinely impossible to predict what will succeed.
Randomness is the magic ingredient that determines a hit.
But what about The Doors? And what about direct response marketing, where decisions are more likely to be independent? And is there anything positive we can conclude from all this?
I believe so. But this post is running long already… so if you’re interested in more on this, I’ll finish it up tomorrow.