Contagious: Why Things Catch On

by Jonah Berger

We need to design products and ideas that are frequently triggered by the environment and create new triggers by linking our products and ideas to prevalent cues in that environment. Top of mind leads to tip of tongue.

Naturally contagious content usually evokes some sort of emotion.

These are the six principles of contagiousness: products or ideas that contain Social Currency and are Triggered, Emotional, Public, Practically Valuable, and wrapped into Stories.

more than 40 percent of what people talk about is their personal experiences or personal relationships.

Give people a way to make themselves look good while promoting their products and ideas along the way. There are three ways to do that: (1) find inner remarkability; (2) leverage game mechanics; and (3) make people feel like insiders.

And talking about remarkable things provides social currency.

The key to finding inner remarkability is to think about what makes something interesting, surprising, or novel.

One way to generate surprise is by breaking a pattern people have come to expect.

People don’t just care about how they are doing, they care about their performance in relation to others.

marketing isn’t about trying to convince people to purchase things they don’t want or need. Marketing is about tapping into their genuine enthusiasm for products and services that they find useful. Or fun. Or beautiful. Marketing is about spreading the love.

Music researchers Adrian North, David Hargreaves, and Jennifer McKendrick

So rather than just going for a catchy message, consider the context. Think about whether the message will be triggered by the everyday environments of the target audience.

a strong trigger can be much more effective than a catchy slogan. Even though they hated the slogan, college students ate more fruits and vegetables when

cafeteria trays triggered reminders of the health benefits. Just being exposed to a clever slogan didn’t change behavior at all.

Researchers call this strategy the poison parasite because it slyly injects “poison” (your message) into a rival’s message by making it a trigger for your own.

What’s a good trigger in this instance? Anything you have to take with you to buy groceries. Your shopping list, for example, is a great one. Imagine if every time you saw your shopping list, it made you think of your reusable bags. It would be much harder to leave the bags at home.

HIGH AROUSAL

Awe

Excitement

Amusement ...

Anger

Anxiety

Would physiological arousal be the key to the puzzle? It was. Understanding arousal helps integrate the different results we had found so far. Anger and anxiety lead people to share because, like awe, they are high-arousal emotions. They kindle the fire, activate people, and drive them to take action.

The best results don’t show up in a search engine, they show up in people’s lives.”

Write down why you think people are doing something. Then ask “Why is this important?” three times. Each time you do this, note your answer, and you’ll notice that you drill down further and further toward uncovering not only the core of an idea, but the emotion behind it.

Emotions drive people to action. They make us laugh, shout, and cry, and they make us talk, share, and buy. So rather than quoting statistics or providing information, we need to focus on feelings.

make something that will move people. People don’t want to feel like they’re being told something—they want to be entertained, they want to be moved.

Is there something that generates social proof that sticks around even when the product is not being used or the idea is not top of mind? Yes. And it’s called behavioral residue.

bounded rationality, a new perspective on intuitive judgment and choice.

“prospect theory.” The theory is amazingly rich, but at its core, it’s based on a very basic idea. The way people actually make decisions often violates standard economic assumptions about how they should make decisions. Judgments and decisions are not always rational or optimal. Instead, they are based on psychological principles of how people perceive and process information. Just as perceptual processes influence whether we see a particular sweater as red or view an object on the horizon as far away, they also influence whether a price seems high or a deal seems good. Along with Richard Thaler’s work, Kahneman and Tversky’s research is some of the earliest studying what we now think of as “behavioral economics.”

Reference points help explain the barbecue grill scenarios we discussed a few pages ago.

Setting a higher reference point made the first deal seem better even though the price was higher overall.

Marketing

scientists Eric Anderson and Duncan Simester

prospect theory is something called “diminishing sensitivity.”

The same change—gaining ten more dollars—has a smaller and smaller impact the farther you move from your reference point of zero dollars or not winning anything.

Researchers find that whether a discount seems larger as money or percentage off depends on the original price. For low-priced products, like books or groceries, price reductions seem more significant when they are framed in percentage terms.

For high-priced products, however, the opposite is true. For things like laptops or other big-ticket items, framing price reductions in dollar terms (rather than percentage terms) makes them seem like a better offer.

If the product’s price is less than $100, the Rule of 100 says that percentage discounts will seem larger. For a $30 T-shirt or a $15 entrée, even a $3 discount is still a relatively small number. But percentagewise (10 percent or 20 percent), that same discount looks much bigger.

when deciding how good a promotional offer really is, or how to frame a promotional offer to make it better, use the Rule of 100. Think about where the price falls relative to $100 and how that shifts whether absolute or relative discounts seem more attractive.

because people don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.

People are so used to telling stories that they create narratives even when they don’t actually need to. Take online reviews. They’re supposed to be about product features. How well a new digital camera worked and whether the zoom is as good as the company suggests. But this mostly informational content often ends up being embedded in a background narrative.

Stories carry things. A lesson or moral. Information or a take-home message.

Stories are an important source of cultural learning that help us make sense of the world.

You can think of stories as providing proof by analogy.

Information travels under the guise of what seems like idle chatter.

how can we use stories to get people talking? We need to build our own Trojan Horse—a carrier narrative that people will share, while talking about our product or idea along the way.

the problem with creating content that is unrelated to the product or idea it is meant to promote. There’s a big difference between people talking about content and people talking about the company, organization, or person that created that content.

The key, then, is to not only make something viral, but also make it valuable to the sponsoring company or organization. Not just virality but valuable virality.

Virality is most valuable when the brand or product benefit is integral to the story. When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it.