Of Book Jackets and Company Logos
Those who try to create viral narratives experiment, observe their successes and
failures, and try to identify patterns that might suggest further avenues for
creation. But the difference between a viral narrative and a nonviral narrative
may depend on some aspect of the narrative that is not related to our enthusiasm
for the narrative. It may depend, for example, on something hard to observe
directly, such as the ability to connect with other topics of conversation, or
reminders in other narratives.
The contagion rate is often natural, closely related to an event that launched
an epidemic, but it is sometimes engineered by marketers. Their engineering
may be almost invisible to us because it happens so frequently that we get used
to it, and because we find it difficult to imagine all the thought and research that
went into the design of marketing campaigns. For example, consider the modern
book jacket, the paper cover that publishers place over their hardcover books and
that usually includes endorsements, eye-catching fonts, author photos, and
colorful artwork. The modern book jacket was invented during the advertising
and marketing revolution around the 1920s, replacing some earlier plain-paper
book jackets that were there merely to prevent the book from becoming
shopworn.
It is important to note that the jacket looks like the work of the publisher, not
the author, so it does not make the author look pandering or boastful. Book
jackets permitted an immense step-up in contagion rates for books, despite their
sometimes vulgar tone. It may be hard to understand the initial public resistance
to book jackets at the time of their introduction. The poet Dorothea Lawrence
Mann commented in 1921 on this new phenomenon, noting that it prompted
many readers to:
asseverate with indignation that far from reading or looking at or being
influenced by such a blatant advertising scheme as the book-jacket, they
throw it away with the greatest celerity and never, never read a book until its
jacket has been safely disposed of and forgotten.13
Despite such buyer resistance, the modern book jacket flourished because it
increased contagion. Most people would never have seen the endorsements that
were placed on the book jackets, and soon bookstores learned to place the latest

book jackets on display in their shop windows to catch the attention of passersby
on the sidewalk. The book jacket was a brilliant marketing innovation precisely
because readers made the final decision: they could take the jacket off and throw
it away, or they might leave it on and place the book on their coffee table, thus
passing along its contagion to people who visited. Once it became established
that even dignified authors would allow their publishers to cover their books
with a glitzy dust jacket, it became a permanent fixture. In fact, publishers who
want to survive in a highly competitive business where others use book jackets
have had no choice, for the book jacket is part of what George Akerlof and I
called a phishing equilibrium. In a competitive market in which competitors
manipulate customers, and in which profit margins are competed away to normal
levels, no one company can choose not to engage in similar manipulations. If
they tried, they might be forced into bankruptcy. A phishing equilibrium with a
certain acceptable level of dishonesty in narrative is therefore established.14
Phishing equilibria may not be all that bad. In the case of the book cover, there
has developed an art of book jackets that sometimes have significant value.
Another example of marketing-driven contagion is “the news”: the harvest of
new information that news publishers hope will grab people’s attention on a
given day. “Phools,” as George Akerlof and I call them, who do not think about
the marketing efforts, are apt to think that events exogenously give us the news
by jumping out at us. But, in fact, the news media are choosing the news because
their financial success depends on their stories’ viral impact. A recent example
occurred in the United States in 2017 during a total eclipse of the sun that found
many people traveling within the country to see the eclipse in its totality. The
popular news media were relentless in covering the story, because, no doubt,
they recognized its contagion as an experience shared by so many people. Some
reporting took on a mystic-patriotic tone, as if God had granted this extremely
rare event to the United States. Though the US media frequently used the phrase
“once in a lifetime,” they did not mention that another total eclipse of the sun
would occur again in the US just seven years later, in 2024. In fact, there was
nothing genuinely newsworthy about the 2017 eclipse; eclipses have been
studied and understood for centuries.
We also see engineered contagion in company logos on clothing and shoes,
especially athletic or work clothing and shoes. The word logo, meaning a symbol
representing a company or product line, dates back only to the 1930s. An
example is the Lacoste clothing line, which displays its crocodile logo on its