HonusWagnerCard.jpgEven if you aren’t a fan of baseball, you’ve likely heard about the extremely rare Honus Wagner baseball cards. One recently sold for $2.35 million. – via SI.com.

If I’ve learned anything from marketing great Seth Godin, it’s that the story matters in marketing, and the story of this baseball card is no different. For starters, hockey legend Wayne Gretzky bought the exact card for $451,000 in 1991, and the gentleman who sold it for north of $2 million bought it for a cool $1.2 million just seven years ago. One of the characters in the television series Prison Break gets five years in prison for stealing a Honus Wagner baseball card, which was a felony. When you tell a good story, it tends to spread until others tell it as well.

More of the story. The “Mona Lisa” of Baseball Cards.
There are only 60 of the 1909 Honus Wagner cards in existence, which came in packs of cigarettes. The card is so rare that it’s sometimes called the “Mona Lisa” of baseball cards, but is that really enough to make it worth $2.35 million? Wagner was an incredible baseball player who won the National League Batting title 8 of his 21 seasons and has a host of other records, but that’s hardly enough in my mind to fetch more than $2 million for his baseball card. So how did it become so rare and desired?

The Price of Character

Collectors believe Wagner’s cards are rare because he stopped allowing the American Tobacco Co. to use his image, fearing it would encourage children to smoke.

via SportsIllustrated.

I love this story even if Wikipedia questions it’s validity. Collectors believe it’s the reason the card is rare. Does it matter what Wikipedia thinks?

Telling Your Own Story
I wrote a post once called “In another life,” and people posted some pretty cool stories about their life. The thing is, if you take a minute to think about your life, your business or the products you sell, you likely have a pretty cool story to tell as well. And the thing is, the news media likes to tell stories about businesses that involve a neat story about a person. They still do it for Honus Wagner almost 100 years later.