Why Some Businesses Have a Queue, and Others Don’t – Why Being Good Isn’t Good Enough
People with good products and excellent services have a lot of faith that things will work out. After all, if you’re a lot better than, or even just as good as your competitors, surely selling your products will be simple?
I used to think this way. When I started with marketing, I used to market product/service benefits faithfully, because I believed in human logic, naively.
The 4 Hour Queue Vs The Always Empty
Two enormous churches stand in central Paris. One is Notre-Dame. The other is Saint-Eustache.
You already know which one people will queue for 5 hours in 40-degree heat for.
That sounds like a ridiculous comparison. Notre-Dame is Notre-Dame. It’s one of the most recognisable buildings on earth. Saint-Eustache is a church most people outside Paris have never heard of.
But if you strip away what we already know about them and look at the buildings themselves, the gap becomes difficult to explain.
St Eustache and it’s gorgeous history
Saint-Eustache is almost as large as Notre-Dame. The current church was built in 1532 and combines a Gothic structure with Renaissance decoration. Its vault reaches just over 33 meters, fractionally higher than Notre-Dame’s. It’s not some obscure little chapel hiding behind a boulangerie. Its an enormous, architecturally extraordinary church sitting beside Les Halles in the middle of Paris. You can just walk right in.
Its history isn’t lacking either. This grand church was the site of Richelieu’s, Madame de Pompadour’s, and Molière’s baptisms, Louis XIV’s first communion, and Mozart’s mother’s funeral. Berlioz conducted his Te Deum there in 1855. Its enormous organ has nearly 8,000 pipes. Today you can find a Keith Haring triptych sitting among centuries-old paintings and sculpture.
Notre Dame and it’s Compounded Narrative Equity
And yet in 2018, before the fire closed it, around 12 million people walked through Notre-Dame. St-Eustache is practically empty, even though it sits so close to the best galleries, restaurants, and museums on the Rive Droite.
Sure the Notre-Dame is slightly older, and slightly cuter. But it’s not waiting 4 hours more beautiful.
Notre-Dame has, to some extent, escaped comparison with other churches altogether. A visitor planning three days in Paris is unlikely to compare Notre-Dame, Saint Eustache and Saint Sulpice, and then choose whichever appears to be the superior cathedral experience.
Notre-Dame competes with the Louvre, The Eiffel Tower and Versailles for a place in the tourists minibreak.
Napoleon held his coronation there in 1804, with around 15,000 guests filling the cathedral. Slightly cooler than the grey image of Mozart attending his mother’s funeral as a child genius at St Eustache. I’m a fan of Mozart and Napoleon in equal measure, but I’ll admit Napoleon has slightly more appeal for historical fan-boys. If only because he was less depressing.
The Notre Dame is effectively a character in Victor Hugo’s Novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The cathedral was in terrible condition at the time. Authorities had even considered demolishing it. Hugo’s novel became such a success that it helped create a national movement to preserve the building. Major restoration followed.
A story about the cathedral helped save the cathedral, and then the restoration inspired by that story became another layer of the cathedral’s story. The cathedral and its mythology began feeding each other over 200 years ago.
The process carried on. Quasimodo entered the theatre, cinema and eventually Disney. Introducing the cathedral to a generation of children who may have otherwise known nothing about medieval ecclesiastical architecture.
Notre-Dame isn’t a cathedral anymore. It is the physical container for hundreds of years of accumulated stories. Just like how a Chanel flap bag isn’t just a container for lipgloss and hair brushes.
Notre-Dame had collected something Saint-Eustache had not accumulated to anything like the same degree – narrative equity. Cultural importance compounds.
What does this mean for marketing strategy?
This is where things get interesting for marketers. We have comforting ideas that excellent things become the most successful things. That success is deserved.
Before I have eaten at the restaurant, I’ve seen the queue. Before I have carried the bag, I know it is difficult to obtain. Before I have entered Notre-Dame, I know millions of other people decided it was worth entering.
You visit Notre-Dame because it is important, and part of the evidence that Notre-Dame is important is that everybody visits Notre-Dame. The queue itself is part of the proof.
When Notre-Dame caught fire in 2019, people watched it burn live around the world. For a moment, we had to contemplate the possibility that a building that had survived revolutions, wars and occupation might be gone in our lifetime. A particular kind of horror.
Notre-Dame had passed through generations of people who just assumed without question that it would always exist. Watching it burn forced us to confront a possibility that the civilisation we inherited, might just…. burn. Rome-style.
After the fire, 340,000 donors across more than 150 countries gave €845 million to restore the cathedral. Poor old Saint-Esutache only managed 8.95 million for its substantial restoration costs.
The reason for the hysterical rallying wasn’t a collective cost-benefit analysis of medieval roofing.
That’s worth thinking about from a business perspective, because the highest form of cultural value is not simply that people like an object. It is that the object becomes entangled with something they want to preserve: a craft, neighborhood, ritual, identity, memory, or even a version of themselves. It becomes a case of, “I have to donate to this building, because it’s where me and Patty had that incredible kiss at our romantic weekend in Paris”.
Avant Garde and 2 Cool 4 Tourism – The Snob Effect
There’s another stage in this cycle which you may of already observed. Particularly if Notre-Dame is not on your ‘To visit’ list.
Eventually something becomes so universally known that another group (the snobs) begins looking elsewhere.
I could have stayed in the queue for 4 hours, and I didn’t, not just because I didn’t want to waste valuable oyster and white-wine-consuming hours, but because visiting a lesser-known cathedral, not going to the obvious tourist hot spots, felt…. Cooler 😎
Research supports this behavior too.
Jonah Berger and Morgan Ward found that people with greater cultural knowledge in a particular area can prefer subtler signals precisely because everybody else doesn’t recognise them. Mainstream consumers tend in the direction of more explicit, recognisable signals. People who consider themselves insiders begin differentiating themselves through things that require a little more knowledge to decode.
This gives us a strangely familiar cultural curve. Something is discovered. People in the know become interested. Awareness spreads. It becomes desirable, then fashionable, then famous, then something everybody feels they ought to experience. Eventually it becomes uncool and over exposed to the people who discovered it.
And it complicates the idea that every business should aspire to become the most obvious object in the market. Sometimes the commercially valuable position is to become the thing culturally knowledgeable people spot next. So that they can make it cool enough to go mass market 🤯
Saint-Eustache can mean something partly because Notre-Dame means something else.
Now imagine an alternative history.
Imagine that Notre Dame was never romantically run-down enough to believe that Quasimodo lived there. Napoleon didn’t have an ego. There were no paintings or films, no collective memory, no mythology.
Instead, Notre-Dame spends several centuries communicating its benefits.
A very competent marketing manager produces the following campaign:
Maybe we produce a carousel explaining why its masonry is technically superior to competing cathedrals.
Maybe we make a Reel: Five reasons Notre-Dame should be your next Paris church.
Would anybody wait four hours?
This is the problem I see constantly in business. Companies spend an extraordinary amount of time explaining why they are technically good: better ingredients, better service, more experienced people, higher specifications, more features, more qualifications, better materials, faster delivery – All useful information.
There comes a point where adding another feature is trying to solve the wrong problem.
You don’t need another benefit.
You need meaning.
Notre-Dame doesn’t win because it offers 14% more cathedral.
How to Add Meaning To Your Brand
This doesn’t mean inventing bullshit. This is the point at which brand storytelling can go horribly wrong.
Someone decides the company needs a mythology and suddenly a perfectly normal candle brand has a six-paragraph founder story about reconnecting with ancestral feminine wisdom during a revelatory weekend in Ibiza.
Notre-Dame’s mythology works because real events, people, objects, stories and rituals have accumulated around it and then been repeatedly interpreted.
Sadly, we can’t go back 800 years ago and commission a novel about your business, (I’m sure it would have been much more affordable) and we can’t set fire to your business for PR gains.
And no matter how much money you’re currently putting into paid social, I cannot promise that someone will crown himself Emperor inside your shop or that Disney will make an animated film about the founder of your accountancy practice.
But you probably have more material than you think.
A brand story is something you tell. Mythology is something other people repeat.
Notre-Dame’s mythology is not powerful because Notre-Dame possesses exceptionally good copywriting. It was carried by Victor Hugo, Napoleon and Disney. Commercially, for you, this shows that the highest form of cultural meaning isn’t about the story you tell to others, it’s about becoming useful in other people’s stories.
A decoration can become a part of someone’s Christmas tradition; a perfume can be part of someone’s wardrobe. A packet of biscuits can become a childhood.
Recent academic work on corporate brand storytelling argues for something more sophisticated than simply having a founder story. It describes brand storytelling using four interacting dimensions: story, meaning, ritual and transmedia.
So where is the mythology in your business?
If I were working through this with a founder, these are the questions I would start asking:
What happened at the beginning that shaped what exists now? Not the sanitised LinkedIn founder story. The actual decisions, accidents, obsessions, constraints and strange turns.
What have you survived? Some scars eventually become provenance.
What do you refuse to do? A clear refusal can tell people far more about a brand than another paragraph of values.
What objects carry meaning? An object can become a physical carrier for a much larger story.
What rituals already exist? How something is made, handed over, launched, celebrated, repaired, packaged, opened or used.
What place do you belong to? Geography is one of the easiest forms of meaning to flatten out of modern brands and one of the richest things to put back in.
Who has passed through the business? Customers, collaborators, craftspeople and cultural figures can all become part of its history.
What stories do customers already repeat about you? Those are especially important. Mythology becomes far more powerful once other people start carrying it.
What does the business represent beyond the product? Not an invented purpose statement. What does buying from you allow somebody to participate in, express or preserve?
What deserves to be repeated for the next ten years? Because mythology requires repetition. If you continually replace your story with whatever is trending this quarter, nothing is allowed to accumulate.
Nouns over Adjectives
And I would add one more discipline: look for nouns, not adjectives.
Words such as authentic, premium, innovative, sustainable, passionate or timeless don’t give us much to hold onto.
Mythology is made of Napoleon, Quasimodo, the bells, the fire, the gargoyles, 2019.
Brands routinely discard the things that are capable of becoming valuable later because they don’t look useful, or worse, they aren’t trending.
The point is that brands routinely discard precisely the things capable of becoming valuable later because they don’t look immediately useful.
They remove the eccentricity, flatten quirks, modernise old packaging, ditch the strange product and replace ritual with efficiency. So when we go to the cafe, we don’t get the very strange barista who is judging our coffee choice – we get a QR code.
There may already be a Saint-Eustache sitting inside your business: something genuinely excellent and full of cultural material that people have never been given enough reason to care about.
Before adding another product feature, another polished value statement or another campaign explaining why you’re technically better, look again.
The story may already be there.
Your job is to give it enough meaning, repetition and cultural life that eventually you are no longer the only person telling it.
Research and sources
Architectural dimensions, history, personalities and restoration information for Saint-Eustache: Ville de Paris and Église Saint-Eustache.
Notre-Dame history, Victor Hugo and nineteenth-century restoration: official Notre-Dame de Paris and Centre des Monuments Nationaux.
Notre-Dame visitor numbers and its place within Paris tourism: Le Monde, using 2018 visitor data.
Notre-Dame reconstruction fundraising: Rebâtir Notre-Dame de Paris, the official public body responsible for the cathedral’s conservation and restoration.
Salganik, M.J., Dodds, P.S. & Watts, D.J. (2006), “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market,” Science, 311(5762), 854–856.
Berger, J. & Ward, M. (2010), “Subtle Signals of Inconspicuous Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research, 37(4), 555–569.
Kapferer, J-N. & Bastien, V., The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands.
Zimand-Sheiner et al., research on corporate brand storytelling through story, meaning, ritual and transmedia.
Leave a Reply