What does the catfish effect mean? And how did it originate?
The catfish effect is the adoption of a means or measure to stimulate some enterprises to become active and participate in market competition, thereby activating enterprises in the same industry within the market. Its essence is a kind of negative incentive, and it is the secret to activating a workforce. Let us take a look together below!
The meaning of the catfish effect
The “catfish effect” is often used as a metaphor for people who are content with the status quo, saying that they do not strive for progress, and that life should have a “catfish” used for motivation.
The origin of the catfish effect
Long ago, Norwegians in Northern Europe had a tradition of fishing sardines from the deep sea. At that time, there were many sardines in the ocean, and there were not many fishing boats going out to sea, so the fishermen did not need to worry about the number of sardines. They only worried about whether the sardines could reach the port alive, because people all like to eat lively and fresh fish. If the sardines could arrive at the port alive, the selling price would be several times higher than that of dead fish.
Sardines like to live in dense schools, and they also have a lazy nature and do not like to move. After they are caught and brought onto the boat, they often suffocate and die because they are packed too tightly together. Because each trip out to sea lasted a relatively long time, at least two or three days and at most six or seven days, by the time they returned, most of the sardines had long since died. The fishermen thought of countless methods, but all failed.
However, what was strange was that one fishing boat could always bring back far more live fish to shore than the others. Since live fish were several times more expensive than dead fish, this fishing boat naturally made a great deal of money. People speculated one after another: What was the reason? Was there some secret inside this fishing boat? But regarding this question, the captain of the fishing boat kept silent all along, and people remained puzzled and could never understand it.
It was not until after this captain died that people finally discovered the secret of his success. They opened the fish tank on the fishing boat and found that, unlike the fish tanks on other fishing boats, there were several large catfish inside. It turned out that after catfish came into an unfamiliar environment, they would swim around and stir up friction everywhere. And the sardines, which were accustomed to living in schools, naturally became nervous under the impact of this “outsider” and swam around as well. In this way, the survival rate of the sardines that had been caught was greatly increased.
Later, people summed up a rule from this story, and this is the “catfish effect”: by introducing an outside competitor, the vitality within can often be activated.