![]() ![]() Researchers have found that an “honesty box” for coffee and tea in an office break room gets three times more contributions when a picture of eyes is posted next to the box instead of a picture of flowers. Being exposed to a stimulus, even one as seemingly benign as an image on a wall, can have a powerful unconscious effect on later behavior, a concept known as priming. The precise mechanism by which a motivational poster motivates is not well understood. The poster inspired countless knockoffs, and identified a vast and previously untapped market of people who liked their pep talks in poster form. Governments for generations have used motivational posters to nudge ordinary people toward hard things, like stoicism during the Blitz (Britain’s “ Keep Calm and Carry On”) or factory jobs in wartime (the US “ We Can Do It!” poster, often dubbed Rosie the Riveter.)īut the genre’s big breakthrough-its Gutenberg Bible, if you will-arrived in 1971, when Los Angeles-based photographer Victor Baldwin published a photograph of his Siamese cat Sammy clinging by its paws to a bamboo pole, above the caption “Hang In There, Baby.” The poster sold 350,000 copies in two years.īaldwin was flooded with letters from people claiming that the sight of the plucky kitten (who in Baldwin’s original photograph looks utterly terrified) gave them the courage they needed recover from illness, accidents, and other setbacks. Victorians embroidered inspiring aphorisms onto samplers. ![]() Collections of quotable quotes date back as far as ancient Egypt. Poster powerĪnderson did not invent the motivational poster. It was the company’s bestseller, and remains so to this day. Teamwork, the copy read, “is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” The empty text, the faceless figures, the utter forgettability of the photograph itself-together, it added up to bland magic, a poster that could hang on virtually any wall in the world without offense, controversy, or distraction. Successories bought the rights to freelance or stock images, chose a phrase, then tied the two together with a quote, often one pulled from Anderson’s vast personal library of inspirational texts. ![]() You see the quote and say, ‘That’s how I feel!’” (Anderson did not respond to requests for comment.)įor his next venture, Anderson envisioned a product that could fill blank offices walls and empower all those the walls might hold. Working with a small in-house team of designers, he launched in 1985 a mail order catalogue selling posters, T-shirts, mugs, and desk accessories with the company’s proprietary designs. Sometimes things are blurry, but then you tweak the lens and it becomes crystal clear. “It’s like looking through the lens of a camera. I’ve probably heard every quotation out there,” Anderson told Entrepreneur in 2013. Anderson loved quotations for themselves: short, beautiful aphorisms that plucked just the right internal chord. Usually people like a quotation because of its content or lyricism, or because they admire its author. Motivational poster maker meme serial#Successories started in 1985 with a man named Mac Anderson, a serial entrepreneur with a solid portfolio of wholesome American enterprises: a travel company focused on the US Midwest, and a food distributor that Anderson’s website describes as “the country’s largest manufacturer of prepared salads.”Īnderson’s true passion, though, was quotations. ![]() The boom, bust, and rebirth of Successories mirrors the tumultuous changes in the offices it decorated, and in the stories workers tell themselves to get through the day. Successories played an unlikely, accidental role in the birth of meme culture, and in a specific brand of office humor that targets both workplaces and the hope of success within their confines. It’s a tale that includes a splashy public offering, rapid global expansion, and a precipitous fall. But the story behind the posters is far more dramatic than the placid scenes on their fronts. They hung in conference rooms and reception areas, as innocuous as the office fern, ideally engineered (as organizational psychologists later would find) to be almost instantly forgotten by the conscious mind. ![]()
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