Triggers and cues lead people to talk, choose, and use. Social currency gets people talking, but Triggers keep them talking. Top of mind means tip of the tongue. 3. Emotion These principles can be compacted into an acronym. Taken together, they spell STEPPS. Contagious Summary You can have a pretty good overview of the book in this 4 minute video I made with a summary on it. Leverage game mechanics” – use elements of a game to make something fun, interesting, and hook the consumer. “Good game mechanics keep people engaged, motivated, and always wanting more.” i.e. hotel and airline rewards programs… people will go out of their way to achieve status and to fly with their preferred airline (even if it means making multiple layovers), moreover they love telling others that they are a Diamond Medallion member with Delta and what their experience is as a Medallion member.

PDF / EPUB File Name: Contagious_Why_Things_Catch_On_-_Jonah_Berger.pdf, Contagious_Why_Things_Catch_On_-_Jonah_Berger.epub Jonah Berger is a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has studied Marketing and has come up with six elements that will make a product “Contagious”. The basic idea is to make a product “viral”, that is, to have the product spread either through word of mouth, “You Tube”, or any other method of getting your message out to the public. It is also noteworthy that many of these methods are very cost efficient. Author Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.Dr. Berger has spent over 15 years studying how social influence works and how it drives products and ideas to catch on. He’s published dozens of articles in top-tier academic journals, consulted for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, and popular outlets like the New York Times and Harvard Business Review often cover his work.

The rash of spots can look pink, red, or darker than the surrounding skin, depending on your skin tone. So to get people talking, companies and organizations need to mint social currency. 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." Some products, ideas, services, and behaviors catch on and become popular while others falter. Why do some things get more word of mouth than others, and how, by understanding that science, can we make our own stuff more successful? getting hand, foot and mouth disease shortly before giving birth can mean your baby is born with a mild version of it The key to being successful across all of these factors, is to build intrinsic motivation within people – if something is truly successful, people will want to talk about or buy into your product or service if it means they will gain value from the product or experience, as well as look good to others. If you get someone bought in, they will likely tell their friends and family about it, thus beginning the cycle of creating something viral. 2. Triggers – “Top of mind, tip of tongue”

Contagious is a well-written book for marketers, full of interesting stories. If you are interested why people talk about certain things more than about others this book can explain it perfectly. Jonah Berger is the rare sort who has studied the facts, parsed it from the fiction—and performed groundbreaking experiments that have changed the way the experts think. If there’s one book you’re going to read this year on how ideas spread, it’s this one.” — Dave Balter, CEO of BzzAgent and Co-founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association The spots can turn into blisters, which might be grey or lighter than surrounding skin and can be painful. Hand, foot and mouth disease has nothing to do with foot and mouth disease that affects farm animals. How to treat hand, foot and mouth disease yourself One of the main tenets of prospect theory is that people don’t evaluate things in absolute terms. They evaluate them relative to a comparison standard, or “reference point.”

There are numerous other uninspiring moments in this book, similar to this. For example, in his discussion relating to "practical value", he instructs us that if you find a good Ethiopian restaurant, you are more likely to share your recommendation of it than you would had you had found a good American restaurant. The reason being you probably have many more friends who like American food than Ethiopian food; therefore, you will feel much more conviction to tell those fewer applicable friends about the Ethiopian restaurant. You simply know too many people who would be interested in American food to compel you to recommend the American restaurant. What an unremarkable observation. Blah.

Of the six principles of contagiousness that Berger discusses in the book, Practical Value may be the easiest to apply. 6. Stories Berger calls the concept of looking at what others are doing to resolve our own uncertainty, “social proof.” Individuals imitate actions, because other’s choices provide information that helps them decide how to do something. Berger provides the example, of looking for a restaurant in an unfamiliar city: we look for restaurants that are full of people (because it must be delicious or hip), and we walk by the restaurants that are empty (food too expensive or bland). Jonah Berger is as creative and thoughtful as he is spunky and playful. Looking at his research, much like studying a masterpiece in a museum, provides the observer with new insights about life and also makes one aware of the creator’s ingenuity and creativity. It is hard to come up with a better example of using social science to illuminate the ordinary and extraordinary in our daily lives.” — Dan Ariely, James B. Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and bestselling author of Predictably Irrational There are some funny and delightful parts to this book; seriously. It is also written in very simple terms (as mentioned before), which makes it a bit dry and boring. Examples are used, throughout, like I said, and this increases the reader's ability to understand the concepts discussed.

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The key to being successful for companies is to position this useful information in a way that stands out to consumers.