Marketing
Contagious: 6 Ingredients for Exceptional Word-Of-Mouth
Yes, there’s a recipe for virality!
How to make a product, an article, an idea go viral?
Oftentimes, we think that some products are naturally viral, while others are not. Either you have a compelling product, like a Walt Disney movie, or a boring one, like Cheerios.
But Jonah Berger, in his book “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” shows there is a recipe.
As promised, here is a summary of the 6 ingredients contained in this recipe…
1. Social currency
To make something go viral, you first need to package it in a way that flaunts people's egos. If they look good when sharing your article, they will be more than happy to share it.
Here are 3 ways to achieve that:
Mysteries
People like to get viewed as an insider by sharing something secret. For example, people would talk a lot about an exclusive bar with a hidden door, such as the “Please Don’t Tell” bar in New York.
Clever ideas
They like to be viewed as clever, so it helps if your article shares a little-known fact.
Surprising things
They also like remarkable and unexpected things. For example, a blender so effective that it can blend an iPhone!
2. Triggered
Do you think people talk more about Walt Disney or Cheerios? It seems that stories about Walt Disney would be much more viral as Walt Disney is more interesting and exciting. But the answer is Cheerios.
That’s because Cheerios cereals are much more frequently encountered in your day-to-day life. So when people speak, it’s likely on top of their minds, and they mention it.
In the same vein, Mars bars suddenly became more popular when there was a NASA mission to explore the planet Mars with a Rover.
And when the song Friday by Rebecca Black was released, it became incredibly famous on Fridays.
So the trick is to embed your product in something that occurs frequently.
3. Emotional
When you speak about your product at a logical level, it is not that compelling. You need emotions to make people talk about it.
However, not every emotion can do the trick. You need high arousal emotions. Awe is much more compelling than contentment. For example, the YouTube video of Susan Boyle stellar performance in Britain’s Got Talent was a prodigiously viral video.
It’s important to note that it does not matter whether the emotion is positive or negative. Sadness is not so compelling, but anger or anxiety has a lot of sharing power.
4. Public
People can’t imitate what they can’t see.
When you ask people to donate for a cause, it has limited viral power because people donate in private.
However, Movember is a popular movement because men wear a mustache to show their support for prostate cancer donations.
Hotmail also used a similar concept. Normally, people can’t see what kind of email software the sender of the email uses. But Hotmail added a sentence at the end of each email, that reads: “Get Your Private, Free E-mail from Hotmail at www.hotmail.com.” That helped to establish the software brand.
5. Practically Valuable
People also like to pass along practical, valuable information.
Some of the most compelling pieces of information are money-saving tips. That explains why Groupon became the fastest-growing company ever.
Somewhat counterintuitively, when a discount is available only to a select group of people, it makes it more viral.
This helps explain why targetted content that is relevant to a narrow audience is actually more viral than broadly relevant content.
Practical value is probably the easiest ingredient to use in marketing your product or idea.
6. Story
The story of Troy could have been told in a simple sentence: “Never trust your enemies, even if they seem friendly”. But embedding the message in a story was much more effective to ensure it lasts to this day.
That’s because people don’t think in terms of information, they think in terms of narratives.
Stories are more persuasive than plain information because they provide proof by analogy.
When people listen to a story:
- They can’t disagree easily on what happens to the hero.
- They are immersed in the drama of the story, and their mind is too busy to disagree.
Crafting a story around your product is tricky sometimes. If people can tell the story without mentioning your brand, you can’t have valuable virality.
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I hope you enjoyed this recipe! Jonah Berger conveniently assembled these 6 ingredients to form the acronym STEPPS. And I would advise you to keep this list somewhere handy. Personally, I started to use them a lot to craft compelling articles.