Cracking the Code: Increase Chances of Becoming the Next Hit by 70%
The underlying structure of virality
Korean Movies dashed from the back seat to the front row of the movie industry. Oldboy to Train to Busan to Parasite.
Intricate ease made in Korea.
It seems like a sudden success that Korea has made its mark on the movie landscape.
But suddenly?
No, success like this is anything but sudden.
Popularity and virality work through an underlying set of structures, whether we are talking about art, movies, or writing.
From the Italian Renaissance to the Korean Ignition: writers, artists, and creators want to go viral, make an impact, and get noticed.
Let’s take a look behind the curtain of success and virality.
First, novelty doesn´t equal virality
Although Korean films are visually stunning, thought-provoking, captivating, and novel to Western audiences, that can’t be the only reason for their growth.
A new idea often meets a wall of suspicion and disbelief if it is too far from the familiar canon. In popular movies, there is — most of the time — the underlying structure of the hero’s journey. A guy meets a girl, has a crisis, overcomes it, and has a happy ending. Movies like Parasite work within common patterns, such as a conflict between the rich and the poor that is familiar to every society on the planet. But they’ve added layers of intrigue and twists, unusual character behavior — which infuses the familiar with the novel.
Other innovators such as Leonardo Da Vinci or Nikola Tesla always walked the line of being ludicrous in the public eye when introducing novelty. Tesla’s ideas of wireless power transmission or Da Vinci’s flying machines preceded not only technological necessities but also social paradigms.
Moreover, modern culture is obsessed with the hottest trends. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa speaks of an innate desire for novelty in Western societies. Driven by factors such as technological innovation, status-seeking, and FOMO (fear of missing out), individuals eagerly embrace new songs, movies, apps, and gadgets. But innovation alone doesn’t make an idea or product a hit.
So if novelty isn’t the golden ticket to fame, something else must serve as the key.
To understand this, we need to take a closer look at how our brains make sense of the world around us.
Fluency and ease of thinking
Our brains receive millions of impressions every day. Imagine millions of Skittles of different colors entering your brain. Your cognition sorts all the colors into the fitting boxes; that´s what we call patterns.
Patterns help us make sense of the world. Quick recognition has been a tremendously important part of survival. If a tiger is charging at you, you make sure to see that a threat is coming right at you, and you get out of the situation.
The more familiar the pattern, the faster we feel at ease and fluent. We recognize familiar faces of friends and family and read common words without effort.
Creating a piece of writing or a movie shouldn´t be so far removed from already common structures to increase chances of virality. The golden spot is a combination of something new with something familiar.
If your idea is closer to one pole or the other, it won’t stick (either too new and quirky or too familiar and boring).
It´s a dichotomy.
Fluency and disfluency, ease and hardness, success and failure — a balancing act.
Fluency is the ease with which information is processed. A big part of virality is the ease of processing your idea. The easier it is to understand and remember, the higher a virality score you can expect.
If your writing becomes disfluent — meaning hard to understand — people tend to dislike it. They dislike what they are dealing with because they associate “hard thinking” with the object. Therefore, the easier the processing, the better the familiarity, which is the other driver of success.
Exposure and familiarity are the key
Humans are creatures of comfort. And comfort is found in familiarity.
People love to listen to music, that they already have heard. People love to read books with plots they are familiar with. People are more agreeable with political parties which seem to fit their worldview. And they love movies with actors they recognize.
Because we aren´t either Taylor Swift, Dwayne Johnson, or Tom Cruise, we have to create familiarity in a different way to get our point across.
The powerful concept is called the mere exposure effect.
Discovered in the 1960s by Robert Zajonc, it showcases the immense importance of familiarity in our lives, whether actors, landscapes, odors, songs, or goods — we are not only creatures of comfort but of habit in every imaginable way.
The most efficient way to create familiarity is to repeatedly talk, write, and present the same ideas, though changed slightly to increase the recognisability.
The Renaissance produced hundreds of astonishing artists, however, we know only a handful of them and recognize their cannon of works instantly — because we are familiar with them. We´ve seen Dan Vinci´s The Last Supper or Michale Angelos David a dozen times, but we wouldn´t care about Verrochio’s (DaVinci´s mentor) works at all.
The works of the well-known craftsman of the Renaissance evoke — due to their mere exposure — something deeply engrained in the human experience — emotions.
Emotions are the last key to creating a hit.
Emotional Engagement
Imagine walking through a museum.
The paintings share a common theme, mostly religious scenes. Among them — are countless depictions of Jesus among his apostles, but one stands out as a masterpiece. However, when you zoom out, it’s just another among thousands. However, this painting emotionally resonates with you.
It’s Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.
The question is why does it evoke emotions unlike the others?
I don´t intend to undermine Da Vinci’s genius, however, it creates a strong emotional response, because we’ve seen it hundreds of times on TV or in magazines. It grew familiar to us, therefore we allowed it to have a greater emotional impact compared to other equally great works in the same genre.
The human mind tends to gravitate towards the familiar and avoid the unknown. It’s an old instinct that seeks to keep us safe, only navigating the territory we know to avoid the danger zone.
So, how can we apply fluency, familiarity, and emotion in our own works?
Although there’s no guarantee of catching the big fish in the vast ocean of possibilities, we can adjust and refine our approach to better our chances. Simply examining our plot structures, the characters we choose, and the ideas we wish to convey with a zoomed-out perspective can help us discern whether we’re pushing the boundaries too far or remaining comfortably within the realms of novelty and familiarity.
The second pillar, in my opinion, is to consistently introduce variations of our themes, topics, and content into the multimedia landscape. By familiarizing our audience and the public with our perspectives and actions in this world, we can foster emotional engagement. The more we process ideas with ease and familiarity, the deeper the emotional connection we can create.
Cited References:
- Thompson, Derek. Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. National Bestseller, 6 Feb. 2018.
- Moroshkina, Nadezhda V., et al. “The Aha! Experience Is Associated With a Drop in the Perceived Difficulty of the Problem.”1 Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 15, 23 Jan. 2024, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1314531.
- Kounios, John, and Mark Beeman. “The Aha! Moment: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 4, 2009, pp. 210–216. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467–8721.2009.01638.x.
- Kühl, Tim, and Alexander Eitel2. “Effects of disfluency on cognitive and metacognitive processes and outcomes.”13 Metacognition and Learning 11.1 (2016): 1–134. Web. 10 Mar. 2016. doi:10.1007/s11409–016–9154-x.
