Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

by Derek Thompson

There are certain rules governing cultural markets, I found. But they rarely guarantee that the most sophisticated or morally pristine ideas become the most popular. Instead, the history of cultural sensations shows that sneakily familiar ideas have far more immediate appeal than novel ones and that the battle for cultural power is principally a battle over distribution and discovery, precisely because there is no formula for virality or easy popularity.

No matter what anybody tells you, a formula for success does not and cannot exist. Here is why: If you’ve heard that there is a formula for success, somebody has discovered it. If one person has discovered it, surely several people have discovered it. If many people follow the same formula for success, the formula becomes the norm. If a formula becomes the norm, it cannot automatically produce hits, which are abnormally successful. If a formula for success cannot automatically produce abnormal success, then it’s not a formula.

In our desperate search for simplicity, people want success to work like a garage door opener, where a four-number code springs the lock. But culture is not a keypad, and people are not doors. Our codes are ever changing in reaction to our environment. If you can imagine a keypad that gets bored of the overuse of certain numbers—or a garage that subtly changes its code to mimic the numbers from neighboring households—then you are beginning to think like the hit makers I spoke to in this book. I can’t offer a universal formula in these pages. But I can offer subtler and truer lessons about why we like what we like, and how culture works to give people a better chance at making something that moves others.

Products change and fashions rise and fall. But the architecture of the human mind is ancient, and the most basic human needs—to belong, to escape, to aspire, to understand, to be understood—are eternal. This is one reason why the stories of hits harmonize across history and, as we’ll see, both creators and audiences are forever replaying the anxieties and the joys of past cultures.

Most consumers are simultaneously neophilic—curious to discover new things—and deeply neophobic—afraid of anything that’s too new. The best hit makers are gifted at creating moments of meaning by marrying new and old, anxiety and understanding. They are architects of familiar surprises.

Some people disdain distribution and marketing as pointless, boring, tawdry, or all three. But they are the subterranean roots that push beautiful things to the surface, where audiences can see them. It is not enough to study products themselves to understand their inherent appeal, because quite often the most popular things are hardly what anybody would consider the “best.” They are the most popular everywhere because they are, simply, everywhere. Content might be king, but distribution is the kingdom.

It is rarely sufficient to design the perfect product without designing an equally thoughtful plan to get it to the right people.

In the final analysis, beauty does not reside in forms, or cosmic ratios, or even in the standard-issue wiring of humans’ minds, hearts, and guts. It exists in the interplay between the world and people—which is to say, in life. People adapt. To paraphrase Tennyson, they are the sum of all they have met. They are born average and die unique.

One of the most important sources of fluency is familiarity. A familiar idea is simpler to process and place in the mental map. When people see an artwork that reminds them of something they’ve been taught is famous, they feel the thrill of recognition and attribute the thrill to the painting itself. When they read a political argument that reflects their biases, it fits snugly into their story of how the world works. Thus, familiarity, fluency, and fact are inextricably linked. “That idea sounds familiar,” “That idea feels right,” and “That idea is good and true” spill into each other in one mental mush.

When something becomes hard to think about, people transfer the discomfort of the thought to the object of their thinking.

Almost every piece of media people consume, every purchase they make, every design they confront lives on a continuum between fluency and disfluency—ease of thinking and difficulty of thinking. Most people lead lives of quiet fluency. They listen to music that sounds like the music they’ve already heard. They look forward to movies with characters, actors, and plots that they recognize. They don’t heed political ideas from opposing parties, particularly if these ideas also seem painfully complicated. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this is a shame, because the greatest joys often come from discovering fluency in places you didn’t expect.

Fluency’s attraction is obvious. But there is a quieter truth: People need a bit of its opposite. They want to be challenged, shocked, scandalized, forced to think—just a bit. They enjoy what Kant called free play—not just a monologue of fluency, but a dialogue between “I get it” and “I don’t” and “I want to know more.” People are complicated: curious and conservative, hungry ...

First, understand how people behave; second, build products that match their habits.

He piggybacked off people’s behavior rather than design products that would force them to change their lives.

Exposure breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds fluency, and fluency often breeds liking.

In fluency studies, the power of familiarity is discounted when people realize that the moderator is trying to browbeat them with the same stimulus again and again. This is one reason why so much advertising doesn’t work: People have a built-in resistance to marketing that feels like it’s trying to seduce them.

Creative people often bristle at the suggestion that they have to stoop to market their ideas or dress them in familiar garb. It’s pleasant to think that an idea’s brilliance is self-evident and doesn’t require the theater of marketing. But whether you’re an academic, screenwriter, or entrepreneur, the difference between a brilliant new idea with bad marketing and a mediocre idea with excellent marketing can be the difference between bankruptcy and success. The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.

Several years ago, the Internet was awash with an exotic species of headline based on something called the “curiosity gap.” That is, the writer tells the reader enough to pique interest and then, like a cheap magician, says, “You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.” These headlines conquered the world (well, my world) for several months, then fell out of fashion for the same reason that people tire of every marketing gimmick: When you’re savvy to the source of fluency, you tend to discount the stimulus as boring or manipulative. When the audience knows the formula, a magic trick isn’t magic anymore; it’s just a trick.

The most significant neophilic group in the consumer economy is probably teenagers. Young people are “far more receptive to advanced designs,” Loewy wrote, because they have the smallest stake in the status quo.