Derek Thompson’s writing is always enjoyable.1 In his Hit Makers, Thompson looks at two main questions:
1. What is the secret to making products that people like?
2. Why do some products fail in the marketplaces while similar ideas catch on and become massive hits?
To address the first one, he shows that many of the viral hits have some strong shared features (timely exposure, MAYA rule2– most advanced yet acceptable designs, refrain and repetition for music, helpful economics, network effects, and the force of storytelling). But these features are, as Thompson himself argues, not exactly some “secret sauce”.
I hope that the readers are not frustrated by the eventual answer to Why question: much of virality is due to “luck”, and in fact, popularity itself is a product. There are many many products that share the above features: many of them fail and some succeed mainly because of fortune.
In fact, having read only the academic literature, and having looked at the growth and decay of “popular lines” at restaurants, shows, and other services in my own research,3 I am firmly in the Duncan Watts camp which argues that almost all of the popular stories are ex-post rationalizations. Much of the popular literature on “keys to making things go viral” are just traces of science of specific cases expanded with myth-making and author personalities.
That is precisely why this book is interesting and well done: Thompson rightly ignores a plethora of made-up answers, and his writing knows and addresses that there is no neatly tied-up recipe for popularity.
Thompson’s writing is fun — from Brahms lullaby to Bill Hailey and the comets, From Caillebotte to EL James, Thompson narrates the history of the hits, interspersed with his interludes and research interviews. I loved many footnoted details that added to more color to science. A short, well-constructed book.
Notes:
- For example, Thompson narrates the etymology of “trailers”. Motion picture serials showed previews of next week “Does she escape the lion’s pit? See next week!”. Coming at the end of the film, these previews were “trailers”. Nowadays, trailers are shown in the beginning obliterating any meaning to the usage.
- The Familiarity-Novelty tradeoff related to the MAYA rule is critical to the publication of novel research ideas. As an editor, I have seen papers have a hard time getting published because they are “too” novel. I hope to provide good thumb-rules to think about such papers at a later point in the blog.
- Joining Longer Queues: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/msom.1080.0239