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accessible thoughts and ideas lead to action.
Mars bars are named after the company’s founder, Franklin Mars, not the planet. But the media attention the planet received acted as a trigger that reminded people of the candy and increased sales.
More than ten thousand more people voted in favor of the school funding initiative when the polling place was a school. Polling location had a dramatic impact on voting behavior.
So while the song was equally bad every day of the week, each Friday it received a strong trigger that contributed to its success.
Even mundane products like Ziploc bags and moisturizer received lots of buzz because people were triggered to think about them so frequently.
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.
The more the desired behavior happens after a delay, the more important being triggered becomes.
Even a bad review or negative word of mouth can increase sales if it informs or reminds people that the product or idea exists.
Products and ideas also have habitats, or sets of triggers that cause people to think about them.
it’s also possible to grow an idea’s habitat by creating new links to stimuli in the environment.
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.
one key factor is how frequently the stimulus occurs.
Linking a product or idea with a stimulus that is already associated with many things isn’t as effective as forging a fresher, more original link.
how important it is to consider the context: to think about the environments of the people a message or idea is trying to trigger.
science articles frequently chronicle innovations and discoveries that evoke a particular emotion in readers. That emotion? Awe.
awe is the sense of wonder and amazement that occurs when someone is inspired by great knowledge, beauty, sublimity, or might. It’s the experience of confronting something greater than yourself. Awe expands one’s frame of reference and drives self-transcendence.
Awe-inspiring articles were 30 percent more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list.
Emotion sharing is thus a bit like social glue, maintaining and strengthening relationships.
Physiological arousal motivates a fight-or-flight response that helps organisms catch food or flee from predators.
Just like inspiring things, or those that make us angry, funny content is shared because amusement is a high-arousal emotion.
When trying to use emotions to drive sharing, remember to pick ones that kindle the fire: select high-arousal emotions that drive people to action.
any sort of arousal, whether from emotional or physical sources, and even arousal due to the situation itself (rather than content), can boost transmission.
Making something more observable makes it easier to imitate. Thus a key factor in driving products to catch on is public visibility. If something is built to show, it’s built to grow.
People imitate, in part, because others’ choices provide information.
Why were students drinking so much if they don’t actually like it? Because behavior is public and thoughts are private.
Generating public signals for private choices, actions, and opinions. Taking what was once an unobservable thought or behavior and transforming it into a more observable one.
products that advertise themselves. Every time people use the product or service they also transmit social proof or passive approval because usage is observable.
because most devices came with black headphones, Apple’s white headphone cords stood out.
Behavioral residue is the physical traces or remnants that most actions or behaviors leave in their wake.
anti-drug ads often say two things simultaneously. They say that drugs are bad, but they also say that other people are doing them.
Rather than making the private public, preventing a behavior requires the opposite: making the public private. Making others’ behavior less observable.
people don’t just value practical information, they share it. Offering practical value helps make things contagious.
sharing practically valuable content is like a modern-day barn raising.
narrower content may actually be more likely to be shared because it reminds people of a specific friend or family member and makes them feel compelled to pass it along.
because people don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives.
Stories, then, can act as vessels, carriers that help transmit information to others.
It’s harder to argue with personal stories.
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.
Dove got people talking by starting a conversation about beauty norms—but the brand was smuggled in as part of the discussion.
The stunt had nothing to do with the product it was trying to promote.
When trying to generate word of mouth, many people forget one important detail. They focus so much on getting people to talk that they ignore the part that really matters: what people are talking about.
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.
Today, 80 percent of manicurists in California are Vietnamese Americans.
The topic of employment is frequent among new immigrants looking for work (Triggers). So they look to see what jobs other recent immigrants have taken (Public) and talk to them about the best opportunities. These more established immigrants want to look good (Social Currency) and help others (Practical Value) so they tell exciting (Emotion) narratives (Stories) about others they know who have been successful.
sociologist Duncan Watts makes a nice comparison to forest fires. Some forest fires are bigger than others, but no one would claim that the size of the fire depends on the exceptional nature of the initial spark.
Contagious products and ideas are like forest fires. They can’t happen without hundreds, if not thousands, of regular Joes and Janes passing the product or message along.
Follow these six key STEPPS, or even just a few of them, and you can harness social influence and word of mouth to get any product or idea to catch on.
