Read an Excerpt
Summary and Analysis of Contagious: Why Things Catch On
Based on the Book by Jonah Berger
By Worth Books OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4473-8
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Introduction: Why Things Catch On
Jonah Berger introduces his book by discussing the importance of word of mouth marketing. "Going viral" is, at its heart, people telling their friends about something interesting, useful, funny, or just plain cool. While we tend to think all such transmission happens online, research shows that in fact it's only 7%. The vast majority of word of mouth advertising happens in our daily lives, offline. So what determines the success of certain products or ideas and the failure of others? Berger says it is the "six principles of contagiousness" detailed in Contagious.
1. Social Currency
Childhood friends and entrepreneurs Brian Shebairo and Chris Antista created a successful hotdog business in New York City. But when they decided they wanted to create a bar, they were stuck. There was fierce competition and they didn't know how they could stand out. Finding a 1930s-era telephone booth gave them an idea — use it to create an entrance to a secret bar. To get in, customers dial a number on the phone in the booth, and if there's space, they are let into the bar. Playing on the exclusive nature of the bar, they named it Please Don't Tell. Ironically, the very fact the bar is unadvertised and hard to get into made it extremely popular. It's secrecy gave the bar social currency — "people share things that make them look good."
This isn't just an accident; in fact, a Harvard study has shown that humans are hardwired to find pleasure in sharing their preferences — so much so that they would rather do that than be paid money to wait in silence.
People's opinions are influenced by how others dress and act — indeed, by everything about them: from what car they drive to what they like to talk about. Since we know this, we all want to share things that make us seem cool. When a business taps into this behavior, it benefits. Please Don't Tell did this by making their customers feel as if they were in on a secret. Snapple did it by printing interesting, shareable facts underneath the bottle caps — when people opened a bottle and found out something new, they were likely to share the fact with their friends. Inevitably, the friend would wonder where the fact came from, providing the original customer with an opportunity to talk about Snapple — perfect word of mouth advertising! Berger classifies things that need to be talked about as remarkable.
Not surprisingly, people are more likely to share remarkable videos and talk about companies that are seen to be remarkable. And, as stories are shared, they are often magnified as people exaggerate what happened, consciously or unconsciously.
Applying game mechanics to a business strategy works because winning makes people look and feel good. Frequent flier programs do this well — there is a hierarchy of benefits and a clear way to achieve them. Once customers have reached elite levels, they often want to share their status with their friends.
A Harvard study discovered that people prefer to feel like they are winning and doing better than others, even if it costs them significant amounts of money. The study asked people whether they'd rather accept $50,000 per year for a job that others made $25,000 doing, or $100,000 per year for a job that others made $200,000 doing. The majority of students chose the first option. People don't care only about earning more, they care about earning more than other people around them.
Another key way to create social currency is to make people feel like they are insiders in a select group. Online fashion outlet Rue La La did this by offering members-only discounts. In essence, it created an exclusive club. McDonald's did something similar with the McRib. It began launching the sandwich in specific locations for a limited time, thus creating scarcity. This made people feel like insiders if they could get their hands on a McRib. A pedestrian sandwich was transformed into an exclusive item. But businesses can only take this concept so far — it's pointless to pay customers to tell other customers about a product, for instance. To do so would remove the illusion of having insider status and sap motivation. Incentives based on social currency are far more effective.
Need to Know: Making items scarce, rare, hard-to-access, or remarkable encourages customers to share their experience and heightens their interest in obtaining such items.
2. Triggers
Products and events trigger our imagination in important ways. BzzAgent, a marketing company, knows this. They work with major brands to distribute free trials to consumers across the country. Brands pay for this privilege because when people use a product, they naturally talk about it to their friends and family. In short, word of mouth marketing is extremely powerful.
Berger got data from BzzAgent, but he was puzzled. Interesting products seemingly didn't receive any more word of mouth than pedestrian products. Why is this?
It turns out that there are two types of word of mouth. Immediate and ongoing. Imm ediate word of mouth is valuable in the movie industry, as film studios want consumers to go out to the theater as soon as a prospective blockbuster is released. Ongoing word of mouth is more important to products like Ziploc bags, or social campaigns like a crusade against bullying, which needs to maintain interest until the goal is met. While interesting products create immediate word of mouth, being interesting often wasn't enough to create ongoing word of mouth. The solution? Triggers.
Just as you naturally associate peanut butter with jelly, if a brand can associate itself with a common action or event, it can truly pay off. For example, a study which encouraged healthy eating compared two different slogans. One talked about the importance of healthy eating. The other specifically encouraged students to put fruits and vegetables on their tray. The message tied to a specific trigger led to a 25% increase in fruit and vegetable consumption — when people looked at their tray, they remembered the message and took action. Similar triggers are found in other areas. One grocery store played French music and saw an increase in the sales of French wine. When they played German music, they saw a spike in the sales of German wine.
Sales of Mars bars increased after the Mars Pathfinder mission to the Red Planet because the name "Mars" was in the news. Similarly, voters are more likely to support school funding when they vote in schools than when they vote in other locations. The right stimulus can influence a decision.
Triggers are so important that even bad reviews can result in increased sales. A $60 bottle of wine saw a 5% spike in sales after a famous website compared it to smelly socks. A book that was absolutely trashed by the New York Times saw a 45% increase in sales, purely because so many new people were exposed to the book. Kit Kat became more popular when it was associated with drinking coffee, and an antismoking campaign gained prominence by parodying Marlboro's cowboy advertising. It made smokers who saw real Marlboro ads think of the parody, which made them think twice about the health effects of smoking.
When using triggers, context is crucial: A successful ad with the wrong context can backfire. For example, an ad about slipping in the shower was a very effective way to encourage consumers to buy a new mat — except for the fact that consumers were reminded of the ad while they were in the shower, not while they were in the store. Contrast that with a New York Department of Health ad that showed a man drinking a can of soda. He poured the soda into a clear glass, and out poured globs of fat. It made consumers associate soda, a tasty drink, with gross, unhealthy fat.
Need to Know: The right trigger can make consumers take action and buy a product or talk about an idea. The wrong trigger can fall flat and remain unknown.
3. Emotion
Why are some articles shared more often than others? While doing postgraduate work at Stanford, Berger analyzed six months of the New York Times' "most shared" articles. He found out that articles in certain categories were more likely to be shared. For example, articles on health were more popular than articles about politics, while articles about education were more popular than sports. But why was health more popular than politics? Berger had research assistants score every article based on usefulness and how interesting the articles were. The results were striking.
Articles that were genuinely helpful were shared 30% more often than the average, while articles that were interesting were shared 25% more often.
But one type of article still presented questions: science. Articles about science were shared more often than those about fashion, business, or politics, despite frequently lacking both social currency and practical value. Why? Because they made readers experience a sense of awe — a powerful feeling of wonder or amazement at the world. Since articles about science often lead to this emotion, readers frequently share them.
This same phenomenon can apply outside of serious articles. Susan Boyle's famous audition on Britain's Got Talent left viewers awestruck, which made them want to share that feeling with others, which in turn led to Boyle's tremendous success.
Berger initially wondered if all strong emotions led to greater sharing — but they don't. Only emotions that also provoke arousal — a desire to take action — lead to more sharing. Sadness is a negative emotion with low arousal; it discourages people from taking action, so an article that makes people sad doesn't get shared as much. Anger, on the other hand, is a negative emotion with high arousal. Angry people want to be heard. Angry people share content.
The same holds true for positive emotions. Content that makes people laugh or causes them to feel excited gets shared. If an article merely makes you feel content, you're unlikely to bother sharing it. Contentment is a state of low arousal, while excitement is a state of high arousal.
Savvy brands can use negative emotions to boost their sales. BMW did this by releasing a set of videos titled The Hire. They featured James Bond–style scenes of drivers pushing their cars to the limit amidst explosions and kidnappings. During the time period in which these ads were released to the public, BMW sales rose by 12%.
United Airlines found out the power of negative emotions the hard way when a baggage handler accidentally destroyed a customer's pricy guitar. He wrote an angry song criticizing the company. It went viral and United's stock dropped 10%. Motrin felt a backlash after it created an ad that some took as offensive to women who carry babies in slings. A highly motivated group of bloggers took the company to task, and Motrin had to apologize and withdraw the ads.
But it's not just emotions that can provoke arousal and lead to greater shares. An experiment found that students who were asked to jog in place while reading an article were twice as likely to share an article than students who sat in chairs instead.
Need to Know: Psychological arousal — whether caused by positive or negative emotions — leads to greater sharing.
4. Public
Steve Jobs had a problem. He didn't know which way to orient Apple's logo on the back of the screen of their new laptops. Jobs wanted the logo to face the user when the computer was closed — users would most benefit from a logo facing them. But that meant that the logo would appear upside down to everyone else once the laptop was open. This was a major marketing problem — nobody wants their logo to be displayed upside down all the time. So, after much deliberation, Jobs switched the logo to the way it is today — upside down to users opening the laptop, but right-side up to everyone looking at an open laptop. The reason? The power of public visibility.
Public visibility matters. If you're in a new city, you might not know where to eat. If you had to guess, it would probably be a safe choice to visit a restaurant with lots of customers, instead of one with hardly any. This is obvious, but it underlines the fact that humans use social cues to make decisions. We like to follow popular decisions, to fit in, but also because we often trust the expertise of the group more than we trust ourselves. Sometimes, humans take this logic to extremes.
Take kidneys. Around 40,000 Americans per year have kidney failure. 100,000 are on a transplant waiting list. Yet 97.1% of kidney offers are refused. How can this be possible? Many of the refusals are due to poor matching, but there are other reasons why kidneys are rejected. In fact, social proof is a key reason. If you are not at the top of the list, but you are offered a kidney, you know that many people have already rejected it. Even though you don't know the reasons why, the fact that it has been rejected by others is a powerful motivator for you to also reject it in the hopes of getting a better one.
Even though, in some cases, this behavior is nonsensical, it is quite common. In New York City there are two food trucks owned by the same people. One of them is famous, while the other is not. Even though the food is almost exactly the same, the line is much longer for the famous one. Why? Because it's famous and has a long line. People use the line as a measure of quality and are willing to wait for something that is perceived as better, even if it really isn't.
We even see pressure affecting people in business school. Berger, who runs a yearly survey of his students, finds that when people first start working toward an MBA, they express interests in varied careers. While roughly 20% of them want to be consultants or investment bankers, many others speak of going into the fields of entertainment or politics, of starting small businesses, etc. However, by the second year, over two-thirds of the students want to do consulting or investment banking. So many students change their career goals. Why? Because of social influence. In a diverse group, that 20% was the biggest cohesive unit. Once students saw that so many of their peers had the same goal, they figured it must be the best goal. And after they changed plans to match, that group was even bigger and therefore even more influential.
Social influence also plays a key role in drinking decisions. Most college students are against binge drinking. However, a vocal and popular minority encourages the behavior, so other students are compelled to join in. Even though a majority of students don't want to abuse alcohol, almost half — 44% — binge drink. The implications are stunning. If more people knew that the seemingly unpopular opinion (drinking is best done responsibly) was actually the majority opinion, there might be less binge drinking on campuses around the country.
The same effects can influence new car sales. When studying buying behavior, Berger and his colleagues found that one-eighth of new cars were purchased in response to consumers seeing other members of their community buy a new car. In cities where people drive a lot, like Los Angeles, observability is more important than in cities like New York, where people often don't have cars.
The now-famous ritual of growing out moustaches in November (or "Movemeber," as it is called) began when a group of Australians dared each other to grow the best moustache. The trend spread, and eventually they created a foundation to raise money for men's health. Growing the moustaches raises awareness of the issue, which allows for fundraising. Why did this worldwide phenomenon spread so easily? Because it was public. If a man you know grows a moustache, you notice.
The same thing happened to Hotmail in the 1990s. Not only did the company provide a free email service, but at the bottom of every Hotmail email was a little message saying "Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Hotmail at www.hotmail.com." This encouraged others to sign up and amounted to tons of free advertising. It was also social proof.
Social proof can be found in specific products. From Ralph Lauren polo shirts with the iconic pony logo, to the white headphones bundled with iPhones, creating products whose popularity advertises itself is a powerful way of creating social proof and leading to product marketing success.
To capitalize on Lance Armstrong's success, Nike made a yellow wristband whose profits would benefit the Lance Armstrong Foundation. The bands raised money for charity, were associated with a famous athlete, and were highly visible: for these three key reasons, they surged in popularity and became a hit item across the country. And since people wore these bands long after purchase, the bands had behavioral residue. It only took one action to get the band, but the effects of that action — of owning the band — lasted for a long time. This is why companies give away bags or mugs. People use them in public, spreading brand awareness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
