>> Laura Hamilton: Thank you for coming today. I'm Laura Hamilton and I'm here to welcome
Jonah Berger to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. Jonah is here today to discuss
Contagious, Why Things Catch On. What exactly causes things to go viral and how can you use
triggers in social currency and marketing to make a significant impact on your business or
bottom line? Jonah shares his six basic principles that drive things to become contagious. He is
the James G. Campbell Junior assistant professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the
University of Pennsylvania. His research has been published in numerous publications including
the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Science and the Harvard Business Review, so
please join me in welcoming Jonah Berger. [applause]
>> Jonah Berger: Thank you guys for having me. It's great to be here and I want to start today
with just a question, sort of warm up the room a little bit. I know it's a dreary afternoon and
everybody had lunch, so I just want to start with a simple question. Here are three products or
brands that most of us are probably quite familiar with. We have Walt Disney World, the self
described place where dreams come true. Honey Nut Cheerios, the delicious breakfast cereal
that hopefully may cure your cholesterol, help your cholesterol and last but not least Scrubbing
Bubbles. Some of us may be too familiar with Scrubbing Bubbles. It's like a bathroom cleaner
sort of product. All right. So which of these three products do you think gets more word of
mouth? Is it Disney World? Is a Cheerios, or is it Scrubbing Bubbles?
>>: Scrubbing Bubbles.
>> Jonah Berger: I'm going to asked you guys to vote. So let's see, I heard Scrubbing Bubbles.
How many people say it's Scrubbing Bubbles? Okay. Somebody else want to take a guess?
>>: Disney World.
>> Jonah Berger: Disney World. How many people want to go with Disney World? Okay.
Anybody else?
>>: Cheerios.
>> Jonah Berger: Go with Cheerios? Couple of guys here and there going with Cheerios? All
right. So let's start with scrubbing bubbles, since that was the first guess. How many people
said Scrubbing Bubbles? Okay. Excellent guess, unfortunately it's wrong. Disney World? Even
better guess, also wrong. [laughter]. It's Cheerios [laughter].
>>: No. [laughter]
>> Jonah Berger: Hold on. I've been here for 2 minutes. I'm going to get there [laughter] okay?
I'm going to get there [laughter] come on, I'm going to get there. So I think this brings up two
interesting points. First of all we're not exactly sure which products get more word of mouth,
which wouldn't be super important unless we want to try to get word of mouth for our own
products and ideas. If we don't understand why things get talked about and shared, it's going
to be really hard to get people to talk about our stuff. And second, if we had to guess we got it
wrong, right? Most of us picked Disney World, probably about 60, 75, 80%. The rest kind of
picked Scrubbing Bubbles and a couple of folks here and there picked Cheerios and it's
Cheerios. And I think this is just one particular stylized example, but I think it asks a bigger
question which is why do some products and ideas get talked about more than others? And so
that's what I'm going to talk about today. I'm here to talk a little bit about the book that we just
had come out called Contagious. It's a fun read, a mix of science and stories, talking about this
sort of decade worth of research that we've done in this area to understand why people talk
and share. If you're interested, all of the papers are in the back of the book, but you can also
find them on Jonah Berger.com, my website and if you're into Twitter in those sorts of things
you can follow me At J1 Berger. So it goes without saying that word-of-mouth is really
important, and I think most of the people in the audience realize this already, but just in case
people tend to believe things that McKinsey says, so here's a McKinsey quote, arguing that
word-of-mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising in a diverse set of
categories. And indeed in the past 5 to 10 years there has been lots of very rigorous academic
research from marketing scientists, from economists, from others showing the causal impact of
word-of-mouth on sales. So an extra book review, for example, on Amazon, for example, leads
to about, a five star review leads to about 20 more books being sold for a given book. More offline word-of-mouth about a restaurant leads to on average $200 increase in sales for a high-end
restaurant. People looked at Yelp. People look at a host of domains, everything from skincare
and mobile phones, a broad range of things, services. Across all of these domains it's clear that
word-of-mouth has a bigger impact than advertising. Any idea why that might be? Any
thoughts? Yeah.
>>: Because you trust people.
>> Jonah Berger: You trust people, right? So ads always say the product is good. They say 9
out of 10 dentists love this toothpaste, or, you know, 4 out of 5 car drivers like the new Toyota.
There's never an ad that says the product is bad, so it's hard to believe whether the ad is
actually true, whereas, our friends will tell it to us straight. They'll tell us that they liked the
product or they hated it, if it was good or it was bad, so one is definitely that trust factor. The
second is targeting. It's a little more nuanced but equally important. And the idea here is it's
very hard for advertising to perfectly target the right consumers. Say you sell skis for example;
you may put an ad out there that says hey, like new skis? We have new skis. Put it in a ski
magazine for example, but a bunch of people read that ad are not in the market for skis. It's
hard to find the exact right people. Word-of-mouth though is pretty targeted. You don't have a
baby; no one's going to tell you about a great store to buy baby clothes. You don't like spicy
food; nobody's going to tell you about a really good Indian restaurant that has delicious curries
that opened up right down the street. And so word-of-mouth is like a searchlight that looks
through a social network and finds the people that are most interested in that particular idea or
product. And so it's not surprising that referred customers, customers referred by existing
customers have a 13% higher customer lifetime value across the life of that customer. You
acquire better customers through word-of-mouth because they're people that would like the
product or idea already. Okay. Great. So word-of-mouth is really effective. You might say how
we get it. Fantastic and let's jump on the bandwagon, and indeed, there's lots of interest these
days in social media technologies, things like Facebook, things like Twitter, things like Pinterest
now is really hot. Last year was Foursquare. And technologies are great but I think there's two
problems with this approach. First of all, if you had to guess, how much word-of-mouth do you
think is online? And by online I mean on social media. I mean on reviews. I mean on blogs,
compared to off-line being face-to-face or let's say a phone.
>>: Twenty percent.
>> Jonah Berger: How much? I heard 20%. How much?
>>: Forty percent.
>> Jonah Berger: 40%, 12, I feel like I'm on the Price is Right here [laughter]. So I heard 20, 40,
12, anybody else?
>>: Ten.
>> Jonah Berger: Ten?
>>: I think it's hotter in certain areas than others.
>> Jonah Berger: That's definitely true. So younger folks, for example, not surprisingly spend
more time…
>>: [inaudible] websites are going to have much more word-of-mouth impact than other
[inaudible]
>> Jonah Berger: Yeah, so there is some variation across products, but in general the number is
seven, 7% of word-of-mouth is online, not 70, not 17, 7. And it's surprising a little bit given all
the interest in online word-of-mouth, given hardly a day goes by without some article in a
major news outlet about some new thing going on on some social media site, but if you think
about it, one reason we think that there's so much online word-of-mouth is we can see it. But
even though we can't see all that off-line word-of-mouth, it doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
Think about the last time he had lunch with some friends. You talked about products and ideas.
You spread things to one another. You changed each other's behavior. Even though there's not
a written record, it doesn't mean it's not important. And the second thing is by focusing so
much on the technology, we forget about the psychology. So a few years ago you might have
heard that MySpace was the next big thing. You might've invested a whole bunch of resources
in learning how to use MySpace and today those resources wouldn't really be well spent. Right,
MySpace isn't popular anymore. Will Facebook be here in five years? I don't know, not sure,
probably, but maybe not. Maybe we'll have moved onto something else, but what will stay the
same is a psychology, why people talk and share. And so rather than focusing on the shiny new
marketing technology that's out there, which is where we should spend some of our time, we
need to think more about why people share things. And that brings me to a cat DJ. So this is a
cat. It's not my cat. It's a picture I got off the web of a cat playing a turntable. It's not a real
turntable; it's sort of like a scratching post turntable so imagine a little cat DJ with its thing.
Anybody have any idea why I put a picture of a cat DJ in a talk about word-of-mouth and variety
of online content?
>>: To catch our attention?
>> Jonah Berger: Right. So if you asked people what makes things viral, they will say cats
[laughter]. The reason things go viral is cats. Cats make things viral, and that's a great idea, but
as we can tell it's not really true. Right, it's like saying Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby
all have the name Bill and they're all famous and so you should name your child Bill and that
will make your child famous. [laughter]. Just because there's some cat videos doesn't tell us
why some cat videos succeed and some fail and it doesn't tell us what my cat, things that have
nothing to do with cats like all the rest of the content on the web is shared, or off-line content
is shared as well. So I'm going to put an x through the cat unfortunately, sorry for cat lovers out
there, and instead I'm going to talk about science. So I'm an academic. I wish I was a social
media guru. Apparently, all you have to do to be a social media guru is have a theory. You
don't need to have any data and you just get to say that your theory’s true because you think it
is. But I'm a professor at the Wharton school and to publish academic papers you have to…
>>: [inaudible] South by Southwest to share [inaudible]?
>> Jonah Berger: What?
>>: You have to get to South by Southwest [inaudible]
>> Jonah Berger: Ah, unfortunately I was at South by Southwest this weekend [laughter] so I
apologize. That doesn't devalue my academic credentials, but I did go there as well [laughter].
The publisher has me on a tour, so I went there. I passed out some of these orange tissues.
They are -- here you go; you could have one. [laughter] they loved them there, so if you want I
have a couple of extra at the end of the talk. But so I'm going to talk about data. I'm going to
talk about science. So we've done a host of things. We've looked at six months of New York
Times articles, every article written by the Times over a six-month period, over 7000 articles to
look at which articles make the most e-mailed list and why. Controlling for where they're
featured and who wrote them and how famous they are, what about the emotion or the useful
information or the other aspects of the content itself might have led it to make the most emailed list. We've looked at hundreds of products and brands to look at why certain ones get
more word-of-mouth than others, everything from B-to-C from B-to-B. From fashion and
consumer packaged goods to cars and clothes and everything else you can imagine, and so by
doing these investigations we found again and again that the same principles seem to be
driving people to talk and share. So it's not random. It's not luck. It's not cats, unfortunately;
there's a science behind why things go viral, or why people talk off-line, and so I'm going to
suggest that there's a recipe or a way to engineer content to make it more viral or talkable.
Now I don't mean to suggest that by following these six things that you can become the next
Gangnam Style overnight. I'm not guaranteeing a billion views, but it's like any recipe, right, the
more of the ingredients you follow, the better the end product will be. We can make things; we
can say things like a dose an extra standard deviation increase in anger leads articles to be 25%
more likely to make the New York Times most e-mailed list. We can say that if you add a dose
of these things and we've done it in experiments, things will be more likely to be talked about
and shared. And what we're going to talk about today is how to craft contagious content. By
content I not only mean the advertising or marketing messages we build around our products,
but also the products themselves. You'll notice the cover of the book is orange? That's not
chance. We built that cover to be orange based on what we've learned about what makes
people talk about and share things, right, because it's more public, it's more observable. So it's
the way we build our products for viral growth, the way we build our websites and the way we
build our advertising campaigns. By contagious, I mean more likely to spread from person to
person just like a virus might, but the most important word here is craft. Now what I'm going to
argue today is that you can do this for any product or idea. It's not always easy. Is not always
simple, but I'm going to show you that even boring, mundane products, everyday products can
get lots of word-of-mouth when they follow these principles. And last but not least, I just want
to point out something here that we can talk about more during the question period if you're
interested, how many people have heard about the idea of influentials, of opinion leaders, of
mavens, connectors, salesman? Okay at this point, most of the people in the room are
probably going to raise their hands. That's a really compelling idea. The Tipping Point is a great
book. It was one of the books that got me interested in this space to begin with, but that book
is half wrong. In the years that have followed since that book, academics have found that
there's no support for the idea that certain people are repeatedly more influential over time.
There's no data to suggest that's true. That doesn't mean influence doesn't exist. That means
it's hard for marketers to find special people, to target them, to give them a product, to get
them to talk about it and do it all in a cost-effective way. And so rather than focusing so much
on the messenger, I'm going to argue that we should focus more on the message itself, because
while there may be some people out there that are popular, there are many more people who
are normal folks, just like us, everyday Joe's and Jane's. Now what this talk is about is the
psychology that drives anyone to talk and share, whether they have ten friends or they have
10,000. Okay? So I'm going to argue the six key steps that drive people to talk and share. I
think you said we have until 5 after something, 15 after, okay? Good. We'll see how far we get
depending on what folks are interested in and please, feel free; this is a small group to interrupt
with questions if you have them. These are six key principles we found to drive people to talk
and share. Each is evidence-based, based on the work we've done in the field to date. I'm
going to illustrate them though with stories because stories tend to be a little more fun than
boring academic presentations. But behind each of these is rigorous research that we and
others have done and I'm happy to talk about that research if you're insisted. And so I think
given the time we have, I'll talk about social currency. I'll talk about triggers and then if we
have time I'll talk about stories. But if you're interested there's actually a book in the back of
the room and many of you got it already that talks about each of these. There's a full chapter
on each of them and explanations of how it works, the psychology behind it as well as how to
apply it. All right. So let me just jump right in. Any folks from New York here? Okay. Good.
You may know of this if you're from New York. So I imagine you're in New York, if you live there
or if you're visiting, one weekend you're down on the lower East side. You're walking around
with friends or family members. It's late in the afternoon. You're sort of hungry. You're
looking for somewhere to eat. You notice a big hotdog shaped sign at a restaurant that says eat
me on it written in what looks like mustard. Is that hot dogs? I like hot dogs. Haven't had a
hotdog in a while; why not? So you walk down a set of stairs into this restaurant called Crif
Dogs, essentially a hotdog diner, okay? Every hotdog you can imagine is on the menu. They
have a good morning hotdog with bacon, eggs and cheese. They have a hotdog with pineapple
and green onions and they have your normal sort of water dog with ketchup and mustard
boring New York style hotdog. So you're eating your hotdog. You're sitting down and you finish
it off when you notice right here on the side of one of the walls is what looks like a phone
booth. A phone booth? I haven't seen a phone booth in a while. It's what, like what Clark Kent
used to change into to become Superman, right? Fly it open, fly open that door, so imagine just
for kicks, you walk inside. You slide open the door; it's sort of cramped, but you notice on the
side of the wall is a rotary dial phone, one of those old numbers you have to stick your finger
into and go around in a circle. Younger folks in the room may not have ever even seen one of
those in their lifetime [laughter]. I remember one from when I was younger, but they're not
really around anymore. Just for kicks, though, stick your finger in let's say, the number two, go
around in a circle and hold the receiver to your ear. Someone will pick up the other line and
they'll ask you whether you have a reservation. Reservation? I'm in a phone booth inside of a
hotdog restaurant, what would I have a restaurant for? But if you're lucky and they have space,
or if you happen to have a reservation, the back of that phone booth will open and you will be
let into a secret bar called Please Don't Tell [laughter]. Now, Please Don't Tell has violated a
number of laws of traditional marketing. No sign on the street. No sign in the restaurant and
you have to have a reservation. They’ve made it really, really hard to get into. Yet they’ve
never advertised and every day they're full. The phone lines open at 3 PM for that night.
People hit redial again and again frantically trying to get to it. [laughter] It took me personally
two weeks to get in there, two weeks to get in. By 3:30 all the seats are gone for that night. So
how do they do it, right? They're spread solely by word of mouth. Let me tell you some funny
thing. They have made themselves a secret. Think about the last time someone told you a
secret. What did you do with that information next? [laughter] They told you not to tell a
single soul and what did you do? You told someone, right, because having access to secret
information makes you look smart and in the know, right, because the information seems
special, it seems more worth telling. And that's the idea I call social currency. Just like the car
we drive and the clothes we wear, the things we say affect how other people see us. We want
to seem smart, in the know rather than not so smart and behind the times. And so we talk
about things that make us look good rather than bad. It’s status by association. We talk about
things or other people talk about things that make us look in the know. So a couple of weeks
ago, for example, you might have seen and maybe this even happened to you, LinkedIn sent out
an e-mail to a bunch of their subscribers saying hey, you have one of the top 10% profiles on
LinkedIn. And I don't know if you got this from anyone else, but a bunch of people shared that
with others, saying hey, look at me. I have one of the top 10% profiles in LinkedIn. I'm kind of
embarrassed to say my father did that to me. He sent it around saying hey, I'm one of the top
10% of profiles. Why did he do that? He did that because it made him look good, but if you
notice along the way he's talking about LinkedIn. He couldn't talk about that without spreading
the word about LinkedIn and what they're doing. Even though it ends up actually that almost
every active user of LinkedIn got that message, because all the other nonactive users are the
other 90%. [laughter] But by making people feel special, they got them to talk and share.
Okay? So this is status by association. Play game with me for second. I want to develop this a
little further. I want to see how much you can guess about a friend of mine based solely on the
fact that she drives a minivan. Her name is Carla and she drives a minivan. How old do you
think she is? [inaudible] [multiple speakers]
>> Jonah Berger: I heard a couple of guesses. How many people would say between 35 and
45? Okay. Does she have kids?
>> Multiple Speakers: Yes.
>> Jonah Berger: Do they play sports?
>> Multiple Speakers: Yes.
>> Jonah Berger: What sport do they play?
>> Multiple Speakers: Soccer [laughter].
>> Jonah Berger: Somebody give you a cheat sheet for the talk ahead of time when I wasn't
looking, maybe, just a little bit? [laughter] So we made inferences about her solely based on
the car she drives. We would do the same thing about this guy with a Mohawk. It's not like he
couldn't shop at the Gap or J. Crew. It's not like they would bar the door and say, no Chinos for
you, right and they wouldn't let them in. He could shop wherever he wants, but we assume
that he doesn't shop at a store like the Gap because choices communicate information. Again,
the car we drive, the clothes we wear say things about us to others and this is one of those
funny things where you may be sitting there going, I don't do this. And that's okay, but look
around the room and I bet you think other people do it. And other people are actually thinking
the same thing about you, but it's okay if you don't think that about yourself; that's all right.
We feel like we're alone in a crowd of sheep. We’re not susceptible to social influences;
everyone else is. Trust me. We all do it as much as everybody else, but it's okay if you want to
look at others and think it's them. That’ll work too. But the idea is that just like choices what
we say says things about us. You're always talking about new restaurants your friends are going
to assume that you're a foodie. If you're always talking about sports, your friends will assume
you know a lot about that. And so we pick things to talk about because they make us look good
rather than bad. So in terms of how to apply this, there are two key ways I'll talk about today
and there are a couple of more in the book. The first is to make people feel like insiders, and
that's exactly what Please Don't Tell did. I'd imagine you'd go to that bar or even you just find
out about that bar, you want to tell someone else because it makes you look cool. I remember
the first time my cousin told me about it, I said oh I gotta go. This place is so neat and I want to
tell the people that I went because it's a neat engaging experience. It makes me look like an
interesting person
>>: Was it good?
>> Jonah Berger: Please Don't Tell?
>>: Yes.
>> Jonah Berger: It was good. I have to say it wasn't amazingly good, but it was good. They
had good drinks. It was dark, dimly lit. They actually have pictures of like taxonomy, sort of
animals that have been kind of old-style ones wearing like hipster clothes upon the walls, and at
the end of it they actually give you this cute little business card that says Please Don't Tell, but
they also give their phone number so it's easy to tell others. [laughter] It's a very good
experience. [laughter]. It's not the best experience I've ever had, but it's quite good. I can't
complain. I actually liked the hot dog restaurant also, personally, but I like hot dogs. But think
about how they did this. How did they make people feel like insiders? They leveraged scarce
and exclusivity right; they make it seem like a scarce experience, an exclusive experience. They
made people who got that experience feel really special, like insiders. It's the same thing, I
don't know if you've ever been to In and Out. Anybody ever been to In and Out? Yeah. It's a
West Coast thing. Many people have been, right? So you might know that they have a secret
menu. In addition to the five or six things that are on the actual menu, right, the hamburger,
cheeseburger, the milkshake, the French fries, there's also things like a 2 x 2 or a 4 x 4 or the
Flying Dutchman. If you ever go with someone who's never been before, you often order those
things or other people order those things because it makes them look like a VIP. It's like what
do you mean? How did you order that? It's not on the menu. You must come here so often.
They must love you. You must be special. This is for In and Out. It's a hamburger chain. But
because they make people feel like insiders, people like to talk about it and share it.
McDonald's actually did the same thing with the McRib. I don't know if there are any McRib
fans in the audience, probably not, but maybe, oh a couple. So McRib was a sandwich that
McDonald's made. It did okay but it wasn't doing extremely well. They wanted something else
to get away from their chicken focus menu, so they had a chef come up with this pork-based
sandwich. There's actually no rib meat in it, not surprisingly, it's sort of intestinal and other
sorts of meat [laughter] mostly. It's not the best thing for you in the world. You think about
why would someone get excited about this. And indeed, people were sort of excited but not
enough, so they took it off the menu, but now every once in a while they put it on the menu in
certain locations for a limited time, and people go nuts about a sandwich that's not even made
of actual rib meat [laughter] right, a McDonald's sandwich is like two or three dollars, but
because it's special, because you can't always get access to it, it makes them feel like insiders.
The second way to apply this is to find the inner remarkability of a product or idea, and by inner
remarkability what I mean is remark ability is something that's surprising, novel or interesting,
worth remarking on. And this though is a place where I want to come back to that word craft
and this idea of inner. So you might think that certain products are naturally remarkable.
Things like, I don't know, new high-tech goods; maybe things like hidden bars are really
remarkable. What's a product that's not very remarkable?
>>: Cheerios.
>> Jonah Berger: Cheerios.
>>: Floor wax.
>> Jonah Berger: Floor wax, soap.
>>: Cable-TV.
>> Jonah Berger: Cable-TV. I was doing an executive education session yesterday at Wharton
and some of the executives are in the global CEO program and one guy was like, I sell cement.
There is nothing less remarkable he was arguing than cement. Hey, you could even think of
household appliances, things like a dishwasher or a blender. Let me show you how a company
got over 100 million views for a video about blenders. [video begins]
>>: I love my new iPhone. It does everything. But will it blend? That is the question.
>> Jonah Berger: You guys are going to like this one.
>>: Let's find out.
>> Jonah Berger: It's going to go viral internally today, right?
>>: I think I'm going to push the smoothie button. [applause] [laughter]
>> Jonah Berger: [laughter]. If you remember nothing else about my presentation except this
moment, this will be your favorite part. It'll all downhill from here. This is when people start
clutching their phones to make sure that they're safe. [laughter].
>>: ismoke. Don't breathe this.
>> Jonah Berger: That's all that's left.
>>: Now you fans on YouTube have asked me to blend an iPhone, so I did it, but I have another.
I'm going to put this on eBay. [video ends]
>> Jonah Berger: So how many people found that at least a little bit remarkable? A little bit?
Yeah. This is a blender. Okay, if they can do this with blenders you can do this with anything.
Let me tell you about how this happened because the story’s a little bit useful. Head of new
marketing hires nameless George Wright. His first day in the office he comes in. He notices a
pile of sawdust on the floor. He turns to one of his colleagues and he says are we remodeling?
Why is there sawdust on the floor? What's going on? They say no. The CEO is doing what he
tries to do every day, break blenders. The CEO would take 2 x 4 pieces of wood, golf balls,
marbles, Bic lighters, anything he could find, chuck it in the blender and see if the blender was
tough enough to handle it. And the marketing guy was like this is amazing. So he took a $50
budget, not 50 million, not 50,000, $50 and filmed his CEO; you all laughed at that guy. That
was the CEO of the company [laughter]. That's why he was a goofy guy; he's an actual CEO, not
an actor. Got him a white lab coat, got him those glasses, filmed the videos of him blending
stuff and put them online, and they got thousands upon thousands, eventually millions upon
tens of millions of views. This clip has over 10 million. The set has over 150 million. Now
people tune in for the new episodes of what they're going to blend next. Every time a new tech
good comes out, they see will it blend. They’ve got people tuning in to find out about a
blender. Okay? They can do this with a blender, anybody can do it. It's about finding the inner
remark ability. It's not just that certain products are naturally remarkable and others aren't. By
thinking about whatever makes a particular product surprising or remarkable -- it's not even
clear, by the way, that other blenders can't do this, right? But he showed the power of the
blender; sales went up 750% after this, because nobody really cared about blenders and now
suddenly blenders were exciting. And so by finding inner remark ability, you get some social
currency. You seem in the know and you share it with others, so that's the first principle we're
going to talk about, social currency. The next thing I want to talk about is triggers. And social
currency is sort of more fun. It's sort of sexy, hidden bars, blenders, iPhones; that's sort of cute,
fun. Triggers is a little more boring but equally important. And I want to start talking about
triggers by putting an example up that many of us are probably familiar with, and that is
Rebecca Black. So how many people know Rebecca Black and her song Friday? A couple of
people. Okay. Let me play it for you for just a second for folks that don't know. [video begins].
Don't worry. I'm not going to play the whole thing. [laughter] [video ends]. People start to get
upset at this point, like 10 seconds is all they can handle. So this is a girl. Her name is Rebecca
Black and at the time she was 16 years old. Her parents paid $4000 to a company called Arc
Music Factory in LA to make her song. This song is pretty bad. Most people hate this song.
Some people even called this song the worst song of all-time, which in itself is sort of an
accomplishment. If you could really make the worst song ever, that would be pretty
impressive, right [laughter]? Yet this song has over 300 million views, so they're doing
something right. What is it? So someone was nice enough to share with me some data. This is
data and I love data. For searches for Rebecca Black on YouTube over time, and if you look at it
what you see is it starts out. It goes up. It goes down. Then it goes up again, goes down, goes
up again, goes down. You take a closer look and you'll notice that the spikes aren't random.
They're seven days apart from one another. Anybody have any idea what day the spikes are
on?
>>: Friday.
>> Jonah Berger: Friday [laughter]. This song is equally bad everyday of the week. It's bad on
Monday, bad on Tuesday, bad on Wednesday, bad on Thursday. I've listened every day. I
checked; it's bad on Friday, but Friday is a queue in the environment, an environmental
reminder of what I'll call a trigger to remind people to think about the song, to watch it and to
share it with others. And so it's not just that things have social currency. We have to be
reminded to talk about them, and triggers remind us to talk and share. So something that's top
of mind it's going to be tip of tongue. If we're thinking about something, and the more we're
thinking about something, the more we're going to be likely to talk about it and share it. Let me
give you a couple more examples of this. And this helps go back to that issue I raised earlier
with Cheerios and Disney World. This is the traffic, the number of mentions on Twitter for
Cheerios by time of day. So you look, by midnight, 4 AM, 6 AM, big spike around 8 AM, goes
down again, flat the rest of the day. This is not rocket science. When people eat Cheerios,
they're more likely to talk about it. It's even shifted to the right a little bit on the weekend,
why?
>>: People sleep in.
>> Jonah Berger: We sleep in, right? We eat breakfast a little bit later on the weekend. So one
reason people talk about things, one trigger for a product is using that product. The more we
use a product, the more we talk about it, and this is Disney World's problem. How many people
have been to Disney World this year?
>>: Oh, this year?
>> Jonah Berger: This year. Everybody got excited. Disney World, couple people, right? Even
if you go, you go maybe once every two, three years unless you're a big Disney fanatic. You got
married at Disney and you go back for your anniversary. It's okay if that's you. Not a problem.
Right? But we don't go very often. When people come back from Disney World they love to
tell everyone else about it. Oh, we went on Space Mountain and we took the kids and we ate
the turkey legs. They're really big [laughter] and we ate the cotton candy and it was great and
here are the pictures. And then a week later they don't talk about it anymore, because there's
nothing to remind them to talk about it. Cheerios is really boring, one of the most boring
products we can think of, right? Really, really boring, but the last time I checked we eat
breakfast every day of the week, 365 days a week. And so there are lots of triggers to remind
us of it even if we don't eat Cheerios. And if you don't buy Cheerios you wheel your grocery
cart through the aisles and you see those boxes once every couple of weeks, making it more
likely you'll think about it and its top of mind. Yeah?
>>: Where is that data coming from?
>> Jonah Berger: This data is from a colleague of mine who has scraped a whole bunch of
Twitter data. I think it's red, red log.net, I believe is his address, but if you send me a note I'm
happy to point you directly to it. But yeah, it's very neat data. There's actually, Twitter has the
streams; you can collect some of it yourself, but he's done some analytics on it already, which is
nice. So you might be saying, well, hold on. My product isn't used very often. How else can I
create triggers? It's not just using the product that's a trigger. Other cues in the environment,
other stimuli can act as triggers. So if I said peanut butter and…
>>: Jelly.
>> Jonah Berger: Jelly. Or if I said rum and…
>>: Coke.
>> Jonah Berger: Coke. Peanut butter’s like a little advertisement for jelly. There's no jelly on
the screen, but every time you see peanut butter, you think of its friend jelly. Every time you
think of rum, you think of its friend Coke. Every time you think about cats, you're more likely to
think about dogs. And so stimuli in the environment can trigger us to think about other things
even though those things aren't there. Even though Friday is not Rebecca Black day, Friday the
day made us think about Friday the song which made us go search for it. This is why a few
years ago Michelob had a campaign weekends are made for Michelob. Really simple, they
wanted people to think about the beer on the weekend. Corona’s done the same thing for the
beach. I challenge you to go on a beach vacation and be on the beach and have a beer and not
drink a Corona. It's really hard to do, right? That's the first thing that comes to mind. You have
to say no, no I don't want that; I want something else because they’ve connected those two
things together, so in terms of applying this concept, two things. First of all, consider the
context. Different environments have different stimuli in them. In the book I talk about an
example of a hundred dollar cheese steak. It's a restaurant in Philadelphia. They have a
hundred dollar cheese steak. They have Kobe beef. It has lobster. It has truffles. It comes with
a half bottle of champagne. It is a remarkable experience, but not only is it remarkable, it’s
triggered frequently in Philly because Philly’s known for cheese steaks. Not such a good fit in
Seattle unless -- I haven't lived here; I don't know but I don't think there's many cheese steak
places in Seattle, so you're not thinking about cheese steaks as often. You need to consider the
context. Meow Mix is a great name for a cat food. You got a hungry cat, it's going to say meow
and that's going to make you think of Meow Mix, right? Perfect name for a cat food. But also
you want to think about finding prevalent triggers, not just any triggers, but triggers that are
really frequent. So Kit Kat had a great campaign a couple of years ago called Kit Kat and coffee.
Really simple. Sales were down. They wanted to make people think about Kit Kat. They said
having a coffee break, think about a Kit Kat. Thinking about a coffee, think about Kit Kat. Trying
to pair those two things together. Coffee’s a great trigger for Kit Kat, not just because the
alliteration, and not just because they taste good together, but because it's a frequent trigger in
the environment. People drink coffee, what, some of you are probably even drinking coffee
now, I see a couple of folks, right? Multiple times a day, which increases the chance they think
about Kit Kat multiple times, a day. And so you don't want to just find any trigger, you want to
find prevalent ones. It would be like Rebecca Black instead of her calling her song Friday, it's
called leap day. Leap day, leap day, something something leap day, right? Equally terrible song
but much less likely to be popular because you think about it less frequently. Leap day comes
around less often. With Michelob, their slogan actually, by the way, originally was holidays
were made for Michelob, but they changed it to weekends because weekends are more
frequent. Okay? So that's triggers. I'm not going to talk about emotion. There's some fun
examples there. We'll skip that. I'm not going to talk about public. I'm not going to talk about
practical value. They're all in the book if you're interested. I want to skip to last but not least,
for the last couple minutes to talk about stories. And so I want to talk about the difference
between information and stories and why people tell stories in the first place. So imagine we
just met and I walked up to you and I said hey, did you know that Subway has 5 subs under 5
grams of fat. Did you know? You would look at me like I was crazy, right? Why am I bringing
that up out of the blue? But I'd be happy to probably bring up a story. Ever know the Jared
story? This guy Jared lost about 200 pounds basically eating Subway sandwiches. Way over
weight in college, his roommate said you need to do something different, started going on
Subway diet, ate Subway for lunch and dinner every day essentially for 6 months, lost a whole
bunch of weight. He went from that size pants to that smaller size pants. But think about what
you learned in this story. What information did you learn about Subway along the way during
this story?
>>: Healthy.
>> Jonah Berger: Healthy. What else? Taste good? Does it have only one healthy option?
Probably not. Choices. You can go there for 3 to 6 months and not get bored. All of the stuff
that's over there is hidden in there. This story is what I'll call a Trojan horse. Remember the
story of the Trojan horse? It was about Greeks and Trojans and the Greeks hid inside the horse.
Good stories are like Trojan horses. There's always something hidden inside, whether it's a
message, whether it's information, whether it's a brand, there's an exterior candy shell. No one
wants to act as an advertisement for Subway, but they'll tell the story because it's engaging. It's
remarkable, and the brand’s hidden inside. The brand and the information comes along for the
ride. So the idea behind stories is that good stories allow information to travel under the guise
of idle chatter. So what you need to do is you need to build your own Trojan horse. You need
to build a story or a narrative that people share because it has social currency or because it has
practical value, but along the way it carries your message for the ride. It carries your brand or
your benefit along the way. You think about what Blendtec did. That ad was really funny,
right? Or their message was really funny. Everybody liked it, but along the way you learn
something about Blendtec. What did you learn?
>>: They're indestructible.
>> Jonah Berger: Indestructible. Which is if you're a blender company is something you want
to be. That's the benefit they want consumers to remember. They hid that inside a broader
message, right? That video was a Trojan horse for that benefit. Let me give you two more
examples of this. So we talked about Will it Blend. The key though is to make your brand or
your benefit integral, right? This is an example of this company Golden Palace.com did a
publicity stunt a few years ago. They paid this guy. He broke into the Athens Olympics. He
jumped off the high dive wearing that tutu those polka dot tights. Everybody talked about it.
No one talked about Golden Palace.com, because Golden Palace.com has nothing to do with
breaking into the Olympics. And so you need to make sure that that brand or that benefit is
integral to the story. That detail’s important to the narrative. It's like the murder mystery in a,
the murder weapon in a mystery novel. You have to remember what that is. That's part and
parcel of the story. Let me give you one more example. This is my favorite. This'll be my closer
here. Has anyone seen Panda cheese before? Nobody. Okay good. My job, my goal in life is to
make this famous. I think you'll like it. See which you think. It's not cheese made out of Panda
milk. That would be even more remarkable. [laughter] It's a company named Panda that
makes cheese. [video begins]
>>: [inaudible]
>>: I'm going to make you a cheese sandwich.
>>: No thanks. I'm not hungry.
>>: Just you know why, just you know why, why you and I, why you and I… Just you know why,
why you and I… [laughter]
>>: Panda, [inaudible]
>> Jonah Berger: Never say no to Panda. I'm going to show you a couple of these. Good
morning. Good morning. I got you Panda cheese for breakfast. No thanks. I don't feel well.
>>: Just you know why, just you know why, why you and I, why you and I, will by and by…
[laughter]
>>: Just you know why, why you and I, will by and by…
>>: Panda [inaudible]
>> Jonah Berger: Dad, why don't we get some Panda cheese? Enough. That's too much
already.
>>: Just you know why, just you know why…
>> Jonah Berger: Now we've got a sense of where this is going.
>>: Just you know why, why you and I, why you and I, will by and… [laughter]
>>: Just you know why…
>>: Panda [inaudible]
>> Jonah Berger: Last one, I promise. Daddy why don't we get some Panda?
>>: Just you know why, just you know why, why you and I…
>> Jonah Berger: One more. [laughter]
>>: Just you know why, why you and I…
>>: Panda, [inaudible] [video ends]
>> Jonah Berger: Okay. I'm glad you all -- I love that ad. I think it's hilarious; I hope you share
it. It's one of my favorites, but I want to point two things out about this ad. First of all, it's
funny, and that's one reason that people share things. So as we talk about in the book, humor
drives people to share, but it's not just humor; it's any high arousal motion, anger, anxiety,
excitement, all emotions that activate us, whether they're positive or negative drive us to
share. So that's one reason I showed this to you, but the second one is actually more
important. This video is funny, but it would have been equally funny if it was for Joe's used
cars, right? We never say no to a good deal at Joe's used cars. If the guy was dressed in a
giraffe suit or an alligator suit or any sort of suit, people in suits tipping over grocery carts and
pulling the plug on someone at the hospital are funny. They're hilarious. It's a good example
because I challenge you to tell someone else about this and not mention the word Panda. You
can't. Panda is an integral detail to the story. This is a perfect Trojan horse for the Panda
cheese brand. Great story, great candy shell on the outside, but along the way the brand’s
coming along for the ride. No one likes to be someone sharing an advertisement. You don't
want to sell Panda cheese; you're just giving something funny to your friends, but along the way
people are learning about this new brand called Panda cheese, great example of building a
Trojan horse. Okay. So just to wrap up, word-of-mouth drives things to catch on. Not just
online, not just viral videos. I like viral videos; they're cute. I like cats also, but it's not about
the technology. It's not about cats and it's not just about online. It's about understanding the
psychology that drives people to share. And unless we understand why people talk about and
share things or what makes things talkable, it's going to be hard to design products and ideas
that people are going to share. So we talked about today was six key ways to do this, six key
steps to boosting word-of-mouth. We talked about social currency, the idea that people talk
about things that make them look good, that hidden bar, Please Don't Tell, right, that
remarkable video, Will it Blend. We talked about triggers. Rebecca Black is terrible. I agree
with you, but it does better on Friday because people are triggered to think about it. Just like
peanut butter’s an advertisement for jelly, Friday the day became a trigger for Friday the song.
We didn't talk about emotion, but you can read about it in the book. We didn't talk about
public. The idea there is more observable things; they’re easier to imitate. Practical value is all
about useful information. You can read more about that as well, but finally that key concept is
stories, wrapping a narrative around that information. No one likes to share advertisements.
No one likes to talk about features, but if the story is really good, it makes them look good. If it
activates a lot of emotion like humor, if it has useful information, people will share it, but along
the way the brand or the benefit can come inside that Trojan horse and go along for the ride.
Thank you guys very much. [applause]. So I know some of you may have to leave. We have
books in the back. I'm happy to stick around for 20 or so minutes, 15 minutes to answer any
questions and if you have to go, please check out Jonah Berger.com if you're interested in
research and you can follow me on Twitter as well. I saw your hand first, yes?
>>: Do your shoes have anything to do with the book cover?
>> Jonah Berger: They don't actually. I love fun sneakers and I wish I could find some that are
actually orange on the bottom. These are more pink.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Jonah Berger: Oh. I don't -- I can't put my foot over my head [laughter]. I wish I was that
flexible, but maybe if I stand back really far people can see them, maybe? No. They're black on
top and pink on the bottom. They're sort of like a mullet, like business in the front and party in
the back [laughter]. Yes?
>>: So you talk about, a lot about products?
>> Jonah Berger: Yes.
>>: What about services? How this applies to services?
>> Jonah Berger: Yes. So really this is about psychology and I use ads as an example because all
can relate to ads. We've all seen ads. But the same thing drives people to talk about services
and B-to-B. Sometimes people say oh, hold on. These are B-to-B. B-to-C is always fun but B-toB is harder, right. Like no one would share B-to-B things. Word of mouth doesn't drive B-to-B
sales. If you actually look at the data, B-to-B is mostly driven by word-of-mouth. That's the
main thing that drive sales in B-to-B, 91% via Forrester Research estimate of sales in B-to-B are
driven by word-of-mouth. And you may say well hold on, maybe it's not all about social
currency, but definitely things like practical value? That's one thing that would drive people to
share in that space. There's a great example recently I saw, you may know Gorilla Glass?
Anyone know Gorilla Glass from Corning? That's in the B-to-B space. It's not directly B-to-C but
they have these great clips where people are shown trying to break the Gorilla Glass and
throwing things at it and it bounces right off. That's remarkable and it also shows the
usefulness of the practical value here, so it's less about services or B-to-B or B-to-C and more
about the psychology. When you think about services the same reasons, right, if it's a useful
service, I wish we had the time to talk about it here, if it's a service that makes you look good,
you'll be more likely to talk about it, so anything that has these psychological drivers will get
talked about and shared regardless of exactly what type of product it is. Somebody may have
had more in a service space and less in a different space, but the drivers at least what we've
seen are the same. Yeah?
>>: So you want all of these six drivers to be present ideally or would a story have elements of
everything?
>> Jonah Berger: So I like to talk about this like a Cobb salad. And a Cobb salad is like one of
the best inventions ever in my opinion. It's one of my favorite things to order so, but if you
think about a Cobb salad, it has lots of toppings, right? It has that cheese. It has tomatoes. It
has bacon. Don't forget the bacon. It's got turkey. It has eggs. All those things are good. It's
best when all of them are there, but it's still pretty good even when one isn't there, and so I
would say the same here. The more of these ingredients you can include, the better your
recipe, the better your outcome will be, but even if you can't include all of them, that's okay.
But what I would say, is sometimes people say ah, we can easily do one of these. We'll just do
that one. The best examples come from trying to do the dimensions that are hard. Will it blend
could have said, great, we're useful. We blend stuff, but there's no way we're going to have
social currency. There's no way we're going to be remarkable. Let's give up on that one. And
they did so well because they figured out a way to be remarkable, right? Because no one
would've thought that a blender could have done something like that. And so what I would
suggest to you if you're trying to apply these ideas, and by the way, on the website is a
workbook, a free workbook anyone can download. It's a companion to the book. It helps you
apply these ideas. I use it in my class to help teach the concepts, but it helps you work through
these different principles and really push on all of them. Maybe you can't get all of them with
your team, but at least pushing on it I think leads to I think better outcomes overall. Yeah?
>>: Your figure about 7% of word-of-mouth as being online, do you count e-mail as online?
>> Jonah Berger: E-mail is online, yes. And by the way, that's not, I did not…
>>: [inaudible] when you say word-of-mouth?
>> Jonah Berger: You were saying, did you say word-of-mouse?
>>: I mean its actual talking, is what you're saying, 93%.
>> Jonah Berger: Yes. And by the way, that's not my study. It's actually from a group called the
Keller Fay Group. They're basically the Nielsen of word-of-mouth, so they do dire [phonetic]
research and other things to collect information about what people talk about over the course
of the day, and they suggest that it's only 7%. Again, everyone thinks that number’s wrong.
When you first hear it, you say there's no way it's 7%. I challenge you. Take a recorder with
you and just record what happens on a daily basis or even just write down what you talk about
throughout the course of the day. You'll be surprised how much stuff you talk about off-line.
>>: But the key part is it's growing though. The new Pope is actually on [inaudible]
>> Jonah Berger: Well, the new Pope is on Twitter is true, but that doesn't mean that more
word-of-mouth is online compared to off-line. I agree it's growing; it is. But think about it this
way. How many hours do people spend online? By some estimates even on average in the U.S.
is 2 to 2 1/2 hours. That sort of, yeah…
>>: What I'm saying is that it takes sort of a snapshot in time where that curve is different.
>> Jonah Berger: I agree it's growing, but I think, and the only thing I would say, the only point I
want to make here is don't forget about off-line. I think in the focus on online we're all going
after online. Everyone wants to be on social media and that's good. It's not a bad thing, but
don't forget all of those off-line conversations because there's a lot of those too. Other
questions? Yeah?
>>: How do you apply this to a big idea and getting traction on say a Kickstarter or Reddit or a
big project like a big science project?
>>: Maybe it's not a product or a service but, but just an idea?
>> Jonah Berger: Like what sort of idea?
>>: Build a space-based antenna to communicate to Mars.
>> Jonah Berger: Okay. That sounds very specific.
>>: The problem with the internet [laughter] there's a big problem with planetary internet
communication and space travel and space exploration right now.
>> Jonah Berger: Okay. So, I talk you most about products because we can all relate to
products. I talk about a number of services in the book or nonprofits or ideas. So there's a
great example of Movember. Does anybody know Movember? Yeah. So it's a great example
of and it's more the public dimension here, but using these concepts, nonprofits are really hard.
Donations are hard. No one can see what anyone else is donating to. How do you make it
public that people are doing it? Well they did mustaches, right? And now when someone you
never think would be growing mustache is growing a mustache you go why are you growing a
mustache and they say oh I'm raising money, and now you know about it as well. And so I think
these principles are pretty universal. You have to think about how to apply them to your idea
in particular, right, so you said I think inter-, inter-…
>>: So [inaudible] did a talk about the problem of why TCP is terrible for interplanetary
communication, and how would you take and apply these principles to sort of a grassroots
engineering effort to fund the science to launch the stuff to start solving it?
>> Jonah Berger: So what I would start to think about right, that sounds like a pretty
remarkable thing. So I'd put that under social currency. How can we show people how
remarkable this is? What if this thing were able to happen? What if we could do it? How
would that change the way we live our lives? I think it would change it pretty significantly. That
sounds pretty remarkable. Maybe it's about getting people emotional. We actually found the
New York Times one of the most e-mail section of the Times is the science section. You'd say
why are people sharing science? It's the emotion of awe. It's the inspiration. This sounds
pretty inspirational, right? So figuring out how to inspire people with this message, building a
story around it, right? So other sorts of things, so it's the same concepts but thinking about
how to apply them in this particular case. Sometimes ideas are a little bit harder because of
physical instantiation, but even with Movember they figured out how to make donation
behavior more public with the mustache and so I think figuring out how to make behavior more
public or show the emotion behind the idea is really key to getting it to spread.
>>: What's the inspiration or catalyst that began this research into [inaudible] what happened?
Was there a trigger or something that happened that made you think [inaudible]
>> Jonah Berger: Oh, for me? So I've been doing research on social influence for a long time,
now for probably 10 years and I've published over 25 academic papers in the space, everything
from whether negative publicity is good or bad and when it is, as to why baby names become
popular and die out, all sorts of things related to social influence. And I'll tell you a little story
since we have a second. So I was in graduate school and I would read the Wall Street Journal
every once in a while and it used to be on the inside page of the Wall Street Journal, there was
a little list of the most viewed and the most shared articles in the Wall Street Journal. So I'd go
down to the library every day at night. In graduate school we had access to the library at night
and when no one was around I'd take my scissors and I'd cut out these articles. And I started
making a stack of them, a stack of which were the five most read and five most shared articles
and I thought okay, I'll do some analysis on. And of course you're sitting there going there's no
way I can do this and you were right. I started looking for parallels. I couldn't find them. A
colleague of mine suggested a much better idea. She said like let's build a web crawler, so we
did. We did it for the Times because the Times is a bigger paper. It has a larger readership. We
collected everything that came out on the Times home page every day for six months and then
we started doing the analysis, and so I think it's to me at least, talking is something we do all
the time. We don't even think about it. It's almost like breathing or eating. It's like oh yeah,
talking. But if you think about it, we do it a whole lot. But we don't really have much of an
understanding about why we talk about one thing rather than another, so this was sort of more
business focused talk, how to apply these things. But I think it's equally interesting just as a
person, right, if you're sitting down at lunch, why do people bring up certain stories rather than
others, or why do certain e-mails in your inbox about oh, this forward and that forward and,
you know. My mother's always sending me 10 super foods I should be eating or, Trader Joe's
just recalled this peanut butter just so you know, right? When you start to think about these
things, actually, I started a folder and I started putting them in there. You start to see a lot of
these concepts coming up in this space and so for me I like looking around the world and seeing
puzzles in people and I like bringing science to them, and so this for me was just one way to do
that. Anybody else? Hey great. Thank you guys so much. I'll stay around after to sign books if
you're interested or chat and otherwise have a great day. [applause]