Fame doesn’t always make sense. Aiming for fame does.

The Music Lab, social influence and fame.

Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. Sure …

Which recent-ish novel about religious conspiracies, codes, hidden history and murder sold more than 80 million copies?

A.) “Foucault’s Pendulum” by Umberto Eco

B.) “The Assassini” by Thomas Gifford

C.) “The Judas Testament” by Daniel Easterman

D.) “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown

The answer is, obviously, “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown. Maybe you’ve read it, maybe you’ve seen the movie. Fun fact! “The Da Vinci Code” is the best selling American novel of all time.

Wait, what? Yeah, we don’t get it either. If we’re being generous, “The Da Vinci Code” maybe should’ve spent a few weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list and maybe sold a million copies. Instead, it spent 103 weeks on the NYT Best Sellers list (51 weeks at #1) and is the best selling American novel ever.

Wait, why? Well, we could try and cobble together some sort of just-so story about how it happened. But like “The Da Vinci Code,” fame doesn’t always make sense.

Let’s take a trip to The Music Lab.

In 2006, social scientists Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds and Duncan Watts wanted to figure out why some things become famous and others don’t. Specifically, they wanted to study the role social influence plays in popularity. So they set up a wildly clever experiment called The Music Lab.

Through an early social networking website, they found over 14,000 subjects (mostly teenagers, because that’s who hung out on the site) and divided them into two groups. The first group was sent to a website where they saw a list of 48 unknown songs by unknown artists. Subjects were invited to listen to the songs and download the ones they liked for free. This was the control group.

Each member of the second group was randomly assigned to one of eight separate “worlds”. Each world (again, a website) had the same 48 songs as the control group. But in these eight worlds, the subjects could see how many times each song had been downloaded.

In other words, the researchers introduced a social influence cue — popularity. Of course it changed everything. Not only did social influence have a massive impact on which songs became popular, the popularity of each song varied wildly from world to world.

In his book “Everything is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us,” Watts writes, “If a new arrival were to be allocated (randomly) to World #1, she might see the song ‘She Said’ by the band Parker Theory in first place. But if she were allocated instead to World #4, Parker Theory might be in tenth place and ‘Lockdown’ by 52 Metro might be first instead.”

The best songs (as measured by the number of downloads in the control group) never quite landed at the bottom. The worst songs never shot straight to the top. But even the best songs could end up somewhere in the middle, while the worst songs could do fairly well. And if you watched MTV’s Total Request Live back in the day, you feel this in your soul.

(In the control group, popularity was a proxy for quality because none of the teens could tell which songs the other kids were downloading. They didn’t even know there were other kids. They just liked what they liked.)

Here’s the interesting part:

Salganik, Dodds and Watts found that “Overall, a song in the Top 5 in terms of quality only had a 50% chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success.”

And the variability was huge. For example, the song “Lockdown” by 52 Metro ranked 26th in the control group, but it was #1 in one world and #40 in another.

So what does this mean for you?

Fame is social. It happens in the weird, messy, gooey, collective aggregate. It absolutely can be engineered (and usually is). Quality matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. “The Da Vinci Code” is fun, but it’s obviously not the best American novel. It’s not even the best novel written by Dan Brown.

Fame has nothing to do with reason or logic.

Is Red Bull the best energy drink? Is Tide the best detergent? Does GM really make the best cars? Is St. Jude the best children’s hospital? Does Shell produce the best gasoline? Is Geico the best insurance company? Does Hershey make the best chocolate? Does it matter?

All of these brands fall somewhere between great, good and good enough, except for Red Bull, which is bafflingly terrible. But these brands aren’t famous because they’re good. They’re famous for a bunch of reasons, including the promises they make, the emotionally resonant stories they tell, their relentless brand building and time. Oh, and a little bit of luck.

To put it into the language of marketing effectiveness, these brands have built a metric shedload of mental and physical availability. They’ve made themselves easy to think of, easy to find, easy to feel good about and easy to buy … and they’ve done it consistently for decades.

But if fame is unpredictable, why bother?

Because fame amplifies everything a brand does. It lowers acquisition costs and boosts advertising effectiveness, media efficiency, reach, pricing power, profitability and market share growth. Fame is worth aiming for, and if “The Da Vinci Code” can get there, any brand can get there. We can help.

Markets are shaped by perception, popularity, and social influence, so offering a better mousetrap isn’t enough. You need some really good cheese to bait the trap. Because people don’t always choose better — they choose the most visible, the most familiar, the most “The Da Vinci Code.” People overwhelmingly choose fame.

We’ll see you next time.

Sources!

“Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails Us” – Duncan Watts
“Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market” – Salganik and Watts