Stories Endure, Images Fade

A common tenet guiding many companies today, particularly in the creative and cultural industries – cinema, music, publishing, videogames – is that audiences do not like novelty. We live in the era of remakes, heritage sequels and revisitations of popular stories. This “novelty aversion” has been shown in many empirical studies. However, these studies do not identify what in the product might be driving this novelty aversion. Is it the core idea at the heart of the product, or the way the product is visually presented – its packaging? Judging from their actions, companies seem to think it is the former: while the resources invested to recruit good content creators are shrinking, companies invest a lot of money in creative product designs – CGI, visual effects, covers and the like. In other words, the way the product is presented is assumed to be as important, and often more important, than its core characteristics. 

But is this assumption well-founded? My coauthor Davide Orazi and I conducted a study across multiple settings – moviemaking, boardgames and a lab experiment – to answer this question. The results? Companies have it all mixed up. Audiences actually love creative content, while they are mixed in their reactions to creative packaging. Experts and general audiences alike are instead much more likely to appreciate a product when the content is highly creative, recombining different genres, categories and logics into something new. The same is not true of creative packaging: audiences either care less about it, do not care at all, or even have negative reactions to a product whose packaging is very different from what they are used to seeing. In short, audiences care a lot about creative content, while creative packaging is unimportant and can even be detrimental to product appreciation.

These results are hardly surprising once we take a more historical perspective – something that companies, often fixated on the present and rarely looking backwards, sometimes seem to lack. When we think of highly creative cultural products – those that shaped our collective imagination and became part of our shared cultural heritage – we easily notice that what made those products special was not the creativity of their visuals, but the creativity of their content. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts revolutionized comics by talking creatively about serious subjects like alienation and depression, yet its drawings were extremely simple and conventional. Similarly, the most celebrated IPs in the movie industry – those that are engendering the aforementioned sequels and remakes – are popular with audiences because of the creativity of their plots. Top Gun, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Star Wars and Alien became part of the popular imagination not because of never-before-seen visuals, but because of their creative world building and innovative plot and genre formulas. Alien was famously pitched as “Jaws, but in space” – a notion that sounds crazy, risky, but with a high creative potential. This is not to say that visuals are not important – they are – but they can just be good, without necessarily having to innovate or do something new: quality and creativity are two different things.

Companies need a change in perspective – a change that could actually benefit not only their revenues, but also their costs: paying for the best talent in content creation is still less expensive that developing novel, dazzling visuals – a cost intensive activity where competition and technological development are raising the bar for sophistication, and hence costs, every year. Some recent successes are already applying this formula, like the movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

In his book Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull, former CEO of Pixar Animation, illustrated a key principle guiding the studio: story is king. Without a creative story, he argued, no movie can be successful. Our study shows that Pixar was indeed right. Creative content is king, creative packaging is not. Companies operating in cultural industries should take notice, and invest accordingly. Pay good talent for good ideas, and success will come knocking.