From David Rowan’s blog:
How did eBay make a boring tech firm look sexy? By inventing its own ‘creation myth’. David Rowan reports
It was the warm, smalltown story of a corporate giant’s humble beginnings that enticed Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, even the fact-obsessed New Yorker. When Pam Wesley wanted to boost her collection of Pez sweet dispensers, her fiance, Pierre Omidyar, built a website for her to trade them. That website grew to be the huge online auction house eBay, one of the internet gold rush’s few success stories – even though, in the words of the company’s PR chief, Mary Lou Song, it began simply “as kind of a love token”.
It was a touching tale, recounted in endless profiles on both sides of the Atlantic, with only one flaw: it was a lie. As Song admits in a new book by Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, she invented the story five years ago to generate publicity for an otherwise dull tech company. “No one wants to hear about a 30-year-old genius who wanted to create a perfect market,” Song confesses. So she constructed what corporate PRs call a “creation myth”, and hoodwinked some of the world’s most respected reporters.
[...] “Reporters didn’t show much interest in marketplaces, or battered keyboards or Star Wars artefacts for sale,” he says – until they heard the Pez story. “Inevitably, the finished story would mention the Pez angle but leave out virtually all the other factors.”
Tech companies, often those hardest to sell to journalists as “sexy”, are those most commonly linked with creation myths. Apple Computers and Hewlett-Packard even ran commercials celebrating their garage origins. When three management consultants launched an online betting site, Flutter.com, three years ago, it was widely reported that it stemmed from their own betting competitions during a Super Bowl party. “That wasn’t the case,” says a source close to the team, “but it didn’t stop them winning the column inches.”