Every once in a while, I’ll read a book that has absolutely nothing to do with small business, yet somehow it sparks an idea for a future blog post. That’s exactly what happened over the past holiday weekend while I was reading Narrative Economics by Robert Shiller.
The book isn’t about marketing. It’s about how economic narratives spread through society. Shiller argues that narratives behave much like epidemics. Some quietly disappear while others seem to spread everywhere almost overnight. Economists can usually explain, after the fact, why a particular narrative became contagious, but predicting which one will capture everyone’s attention next is much more difficult.
As I was reading, I found myself drifting away from economics and thinking about small business. It struck me that epidemiologists have spent centuries studying one very specific question:
Why do some diseases spread rapidly while others never seem to gain much traction?
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if they’d unknowingly been teaching entrepreneurs about marketing all along.
At first, I thought it was simply an interesting analogy. However, the longer I thought about it, the more I realized it wasn’t an analogy at all. It was a different way of looking at marketing.
Most entrepreneurs spend an enormous amount of time improving their products and services. We work on quality. We add features. We refine the customer experience. Those are all worthwhile pursuits, but they also assume something that may not be true. We tend to believe that if we simply build a better product, success will naturally follow.
Biology suggests we may be asking the wrong question.
The more I explored the comparison, the more I realized epidemiologists and entrepreneurs are really trying to answer the same question. They aren’t asking whether one thing is better than another. They’re trying to understand why one thing spreads while something else quietly disappears.
To me, that’s a much more interesting question.
Evolution Doesn’t Always Reward the Best. It Rewards What Spreads.
Like most people, I’ve always judged diseases by how deadly they are. Epidemiologists don’t. They separate several different characteristics because each one affects how widely a disease can spread.
Take Ebola. It’s one of the deadliest viruses we’ve ever encountered. In many cases, it kills the host within days or weeks of infection. It also requires close physical contact to spread from one person to another. Those two characteristics make Ebola extremely dangerous, but they also limit its ability to spread over long periods of time. Ebola outbreaks tend to burn brightly, then burn out.
HIV/AIDS presents a different situation. Similar to Ebola, HIV/AIDS requires intimate person-to-person contact to propagate, making it relatively inefficient compared with airborne diseases. But HIV has another characteristic that changes everything. An infected individual may carry the virus for years before symptoms develop. That long incubation period dramatically increases the opportunities for transmission, even though the transmission mechanism itself is relatively limited.
Then there’s seasonal influenza. Most people recover, remain active, and unknowingly spread the virus through the air by simply talking, coughing, or sneezing. The host survives. The transmission mechanism is highly efficient. The result is that influenza infects millions of people every year despite being far less lethal than either Ebola or HIV.
That got me thinking.
How often do entrepreneurs evaluate their businesses the same way most of us evaluate diseases? We obsess over how good our product is, assuming the best product will eventually win. But maybe we’re measuring the wrong thing. Maybe we should spend as much time thinking about how our products, services, and ideas spread as we do improving the products themselves.
That thought reminded me of something from my Coast Guard days.
One of my collateral duties aboard ship was managing the evening movie entertainment. Every night, we’d show movies throughout the ship for the off-duty crew, which meant deciding which equipment we were going to standardize on. At the time, the choice came down to Betamax or VHS.
We did our homework.
Everything we found pointed to Betamax. It had better picture quality, better sound reproduction, and even smaller cassettes, which is important when you’re on a ship with limited storage space. From a technical standpoint, it looked like the obvious choice.
So that’s what we bought.
For a while, it worked exactly as we’d expected. Then something started happening. VHS wasn’t simply waiting for consumers to decide which format was better. JVC, the owner of VHS technology, engineered the conditions for VHS adoption. It licensed the technology to more manufacturers, encouraged a broader ecosystem of compatible players, offered recording times that better matched how people actually used videotape machines, and ultimately made it easier for movie studios and rental stores to support the format. As more VHS tapes became available, more consumers bought VHS players. As more consumers bought VHS players, more businesses invested in VHS. The system became self-reinforcing.
At the time, I thought I was watching one technology lose to another. Looking back, I think I was watching one transmission system outperform another.
That realization changed the way I think about competition.
I wonder how many entrepreneurs are building the Betamax of their industry. They’re investing tremendous energy in creating exceptional products while giving comparatively little thought to how easily customers can discover, understand, remember, and recommend them to others.
Evolution has been teaching us a marketing lesson all along. Today, I believe the businesses that consistently grow aren’t always the ones with the best products. They’re the ones who have engineered the best way to spread.
Stop Thinking Like a Marketer. Start Thinking Like an Epidemiologist.
The more I thought about it, the more I began wondering how an epidemiologist would evaluate a business. I don’t think they’d start by looking at the product. They’d probably begin by studying the transmission system and asking questions like these:
How does it spread?
How long does it remain active?
Who or what carries it from one person to another?
Who is most susceptible to receiving it?
What environmental conditions increase or decrease the likelihood of transmission?
Those questions struck me because they’re remarkably similar to the ones entrepreneurs ought to be asking about their marketing. Maybe marketing isn’t really about promotion but about transmission. If that’s true, it changes where we should spend our time and attention.
Engineer Better Transmission
One of the biggest insights I took away from comparing biology with business is that viruses don’t market themselves. They evolve. Over time, the viruses that survive become better at moving from one host to another. Evolution doesn’t reward the strongest virus. It rewards the one that reproduces most effectively.
Businesses often do exactly the opposite. We spend years refining a product, and only after it’s finished do we begin thinking about how people will hear about it. Marketing becomes something we bolt onto the side of the business instead of something we intentionally design into it from the very beginning.
The more I thought about that, the more I realized some of the most successful products I’ve used over the years were actually designed to help spread themselves.
Several years ago, I wrote an article about “viral products and services.” Two of the examples were Life360 and Voxer.
When our boys first started driving, we used Life360 to keep track of where everyone in the family was. If one of the boys said he was headed to a friend’s house, we could see that he’d arrived safely. If we heard about a serious accident on the news, we could quickly determine whether anyone in our family was anywhere near it. Each additional family member who joined the network made the application more valuable to everyone else.
Voxer solved a completely different problem. Whenever we traveled with another family in separate vehicles, we could carry on a conversation for the entire trip. We could coordinate fuel stops, decide where to eat, or simply joke back and forth while driving. Again, the experience became better as more people participated.
Neither company relied solely on advertising. The products themselves encouraged customers to invite additional users because every new participant increased the value for everyone already using it. That’s the network effect. Once I started looking for it, I realized the same principle was everywhere. Think about Waze or Yelp. They’re engineered to become more valuable as more people use them.
Perhaps that’s one of the biggest lessons biology has to teach entrepreneurs. Don’t just build a better product. Engineer a better transmission system.
Stories Are Better Vectors Than Facts
Thinking about engineered transmission systems led me to another biological concept.
Viruses don’t move on their own. They need a vector. Mosquitoes carry malaria. Ticks carry Lyme disease. Air carries influenza. Without a vector, the disease simply doesn’t spread.
Ideas aren’t much different.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized stories may be one of the most efficient vectors ever created. Long before we had books, newspapers, websites, podcasts, or social media, stories were how knowledge moved from one generation to the next. In many ways, our ability to tell stories is one of the characteristics that made Homo sapiens different from every other species on the planet. Stories allowed us to preserve experiences, pass along lessons, and teach people we’d never meet. Perhaps that’s why storytelling has remained such a powerful part of being human. It’s woven into our DNA.
I was reminded of that while reading a passage in my book RV Season recently. The chapter described an event that had taken place exactly 20 years earlier, and my brother-in-law happened to be part of it. It made me wonder whether he remembered it as vividly as I did, so I texted him, “Do you remember where you were 20 years ago today?”
Of course, he didn’t. There was no story hook.
Then I texted the following three words, “The Creeper House.”
Almost immediately, the memories started coming back. One story led to another, then another. Neither of us was remembering a date. We were remembering an experience. That’s what stories do. They don’t simply communicate information. They preserve experiences in a form that’s easy to remember, easy to retell, and easy to pass from one person to another.
If your customers can’t naturally retell your story tomorrow, maybe your product isn’t the weakest part of your marketing. Maybe it’s the vector carrying your message.
Convergence Creates Cognitive Gravity
As I continued reading Narrative Economics, one concept kept jumping off the page. Shiller refers to it as a narrative constellation. I found myself thinking of it a little differently. To me, it felt more like convergence.
One of the mistakes we often make is assuming ideas spread because of a single event. In reality, it’s usually several independent events that collectively point people toward the same conclusion. Individually, they don’t seem especially significant. Collectively, they become difficult to ignore because each new observation reinforces the ones that came before it.
Take artificial intelligence as an example. One day, you read about another breakthrough model. The next day, a company announces layoffs. Then, schools begin to change their curricula. A week later, there’s another story about copyright, followed by another about robotics, then another about productivity.
None of those stories, by themselves, proves that AI is changing the future of work. However, together they create something much more powerful. They create cognitive gravity.
As more seemingly unrelated observations point toward the same conclusion, the narrative begins to attract new information. Every new headline, every conversation, every news story is naturally interpreted through that same lens. The narrative gains momentum because it becomes increasingly easy for our brains to connect the dots.
That’s when I realized convergence does more than reinforce a message. It changes the audience.
Once enough gravity exists, people become far more receptive to information that supports the narrative. Epidemiologists might describe that as host susceptibility.
Host susceptibility isn’t simply about exposure to a virus. It’s also about the conditions that make transmission easier. The flu doesn’t suddenly become more effective because the temperature drops. Cold weather changes what people do. We spend more time indoors, gather more closely together, and unknowingly create an environment where the virus spreads more efficiently.
Business works much the same way.
When enough related stories begin circulating, they create their own environment. People start paying attention to things they may have ignored only weeks earlier. The message itself hasn’t necessarily changed. The audience has.
That realization caused me to rethink something I learned years ago while operating my Invisible Fence dealership.
Back then, marketers talked about the Rule of Seven. I was never particularly fond of the explanation because it was usually presented as an advertising principle. The way I understood it, a prospect needs to be exposed to your message seven times before they consciously recognize it. Then they needed to recognize it seven more times before it finally rose above the noise, and they were motivated to act.
Do the math.
That’s roughly 49 exposures before your message becomes consciously important.
Looking back, I don’t think the Rule of Seven was ever really about advertising frequency. Today, I think it’s describing something much more interesting.
Every exposure adds a little more cognitive gravity. A blog post reinforces something they heard in a podcast. A conversation with a friend reinforces an article they read online. A social media post reminds them of something they saw weeks earlier. Eventually, those seemingly unrelated experiences begin pulling together into a single narrative that becomes difficult to ignore.
That’s why I now believe the Rule of Seven isn’t really about repetition. It’s about convergence.
That may also explain why so many small business owners become discouraged too quickly. They run a campaign for a few weeks, don’t see immediate results, and move on to something else. But ideas, much like diseases, often have an incubation period. They need time for enough related observations to accumulate before the narrative develops sufficient gravity to rise above the noise.
Transmission may get your message into the marketplace. Convergence creates the gravity that causes people to notice it.
What still fascinated me, though, was why some narratives seem to remain alive for years while others disappear almost as quickly as they arrive.
I think the answer has less to do with transmission and much more to do with persistence.
Persistence Keeps the Narrative Alive
By this point, I thought I understood why some ideas spread while others never seemed to get much traction. Transmission, vectors, host susceptibility, and cognitive gravity all helped explain why certain narratives eventually break through the noise. But they still didn’t answer another question that kept nagging at me.
Why do some ideas seem to disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, while others continue spreading for decades?
As I started thinking about examples, one song immediately came to mind. Gary Glitter recorded Rock and Roll (Part 2) more than 50 years ago, which only reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972. Most people couldn’t name another song he ever recorded, yet almost everyone recognizes this one.
That’s what makes it interesting.
It wasn’t simply a hit song. Plenty of songs become hits. What made this one different is that it never really went away.
The original marketing campaign ended decades ago, but the song found something far more valuable. It attached itself to recurring events. Sporting events, stadiums, and crowds kept introducing it to new audiences year after year. Every football, hockey, or baseball game became another opportunity for the song to spread without Gary Glitter having to do anything at all. That’s persistence.
It also changed the way I think about marketing.
Most small business owners treat every campaign as a separate event. We launch it, promote it for a while, and then move on to the next idea. Epidemiologists would probably look at that very differently. They’d ask what naturally reintroduces the idea after the original exposure is over.
Birthdays keep the Happy Birthday song alive.
Tax season renews interest in accountants.
The arrival of spring creates conversations about landscaping.
The first snowfall reminds people to think about snow removal.
Those recurring events become part of the transmission system because they continually expose new people to the same underlying narrative while reminding everyone else that it still exists.
That’s why I now believe persistence isn’t about repeating the same message over and over again. It’s about finding recurring events that naturally keep your story alive.
The businesses that do this well don’t have to constantly manufacture attention. The environment does part of the work for them.
Think Like an Epidemiologist
When I first picked up Narrative Economics, I expected to learn something about economics. Instead, I found myself looking at marketing through an entirely different lens.
I no longer think the most important marketing question is whether my product is better than everyone else’s.
I think it begins one step earlier.
How transmissible is it?
That single question changes almost everything.
It changes how we think about products, as they can be engineered to encourage sharing. It changes how we think about stories because stories become the vectors that carry ideas from one person to another. It changes how we think about timing because narrative constellations create the cognitive gravity that makes people receptive to new information. And it changes how we think about marketing campaigns, because persistence often comes from tying our businesses to recurring events rather than constantly inventing new messages.
That’s why I now believe entrepreneurs should spend less time trying to create viral marketing and more time engineering the conditions that enable transmission.
No one can predict what will become contagious. But we can intentionally build products, stories, and systems that are easier to discover, remember, share, and keep alive.
When you look at your own business, are you spending more time improving your product…or improving its ability, and the story behind it, to spread?
