Contagious: Why Things Catch On (10 page)

Seven a.m., waking up in the morning

Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs

Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal

Then she hustles down to the bus stop, sees her friends drive by, and ponders whether to sit in the front seat or the back. Finally, after all those tough decisions, she hits the chorus, an ode to her excitement about the impending two days of freedom:

It’s Friday, Friday

Gotta get down on Friday

Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend.

All in all, the piece sounds more like a monologue of the random thoughts going through an especially vacant teenager’s head than a real song.

Yet this song was one of the most viral videos of 2011. It was viewed more than 300 million times on YouTube, and many millions more listened to it over other channels.

Why? The song was terrible, but lots of songs are terrible. So what made this one a success?

Take a look at the number of daily searches for “Rebecca Black” on YouTube in March 2011, soon after the song was first released. See if you notice a pattern.

Searches for “Rebecca Black” on YouTube March 2011

Notice the spike once every week? Look closer and you’ll see that the spike happens on the same day every week. There was one on March 18, seven days later on March 25, and seven days later, on April 1.

The particular day of the week? You guessed it. Friday—just like the name of Rebecca Black’s song.

So while the song was equally bad every day of the week, each Friday it received a strong trigger that contributed to its success.

TRIGGERED TO TALK

As discussed in the Social Currency chapter, some word of mouth is motivated by peoples’ desire to look good to others. Mentioning clever or entertaining things makes people seem clever and entertaining. But that isn’t the only factor that drives us to share.

Most conversations can be described as small talk. We chat with parents at our kids’ soccer games or schmooze with coworkers in the break room. These conversations are less about finding interesting things to say to make us look good than they are about filling conversational space. We don’t want to sit there silently, so we talk about something. Anything. Our goal isn’t necessarily to prove that we are interesting, funny, or intelligent. We just want to say something to keep the conversation going. Anything to prove that we’re not terrible conversationalists.

So what do we talk about? Whatever is top of mind is a good place to start. If something is accessible, it’s usually relevant to the situation at hand. Did you read about the new bridge construction? What did you think about the game last night?

We talk about these topics because they are going on in the surrounding environment. We saw the bulldozers on our drive in, so construction is on our mind. We bump into a friend who likes sports, so we think about the big game.
Triggers boost word of mouth.

Returning to the BzzAgent data, triggers helped us answer why some products get talked about more.
More frequently triggered products got 15 percent more word of mouth. Even mundane products like Ziploc bags and moisturizer received lots of buzz because people were triggered to think about them so frequently. People who use moisturizer often apply it at least once a day. People often use Ziploc bags after meals to wrap up leftovers. These everyday activities make those products more top of mind and, as a result, lead them to be talked about more.

Furthermore, not only did triggered products get more immediate word of mouth, they also got more word of mouth on an ongoing basis.

In this way, Ziploc bags are the antithesis of me going to
teach dressed like a pirate. The pirate story is interesting, but it’s here today, gone tomorrow. Ziploc bags may be boring, but they get mentioned week in and week out because they are frequently triggered. By acting as reminders, triggers not only get people talking, they keep them talking. Top of mind means tip of tongue.

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So rather than just going for a catchy message, consider the context. Think about whether the message will be triggered by the everyday environments of the target audience. Going for interesting is our default tendency. Whether running for class president or selling soda, we think that catchy or clever slogans will get us where we need to go.

But as we saw in our fruits and vegetables study, a strong trigger can be much more effective than a catchy slogan. Even though they hated the slogan, college students ate more fruits and vegetables when cafeteria trays triggered reminders of the health benefits. Just being exposed to a clever slogan didn’t change behavior at all.

A few years ago, auto insurance company GEICO ran ads that said switching to GEICO was so simple that even a caveman could do it. On the cleverness dimension the ads were great. They were funny and made the point that switching to GEICO was easy.

But judged on triggers, the ads fail. We don’t see many cavemen in our daily lives, so the ad is unlikely to come to mind often, making it less likely to be talked about.

Contrast that with the Budweiser beer “Wassup?” campaign. Two guys are talking on the phone while drinking Budweiser and watching a basketball game on television. A third friend arrives. He yells, “Wassup?” One of the first two guys yells
“Wassup?” back. This kicks off an endless cycle of wassups between a growing number of Budweiser-drinking buddies.

No, it wasn’t the cleverest of commercials. But it became a global phenomenon. And at least part of its success was due to triggers. Budweiser considered the context. “Wassup” was a popular greeting among young men at the time. Just greeting friends triggered thoughts of Budweiser in Budweiser’s prime demographic.

The more the desired behavior happens after a delay, the more important being triggered becomes. Market research often focuses on consumers’ immediate reaction to an advertising message or campaign. That might be valuable in situations where the consumer is immediately offered a chance to buy the product. But in most cases, people hear an ad one day and then go to the store days or weeks later. If they’re not triggered to think about it, how will they remember that ad when they’re at the store?

Public health campaigns would also benefit from considering the context. Take messages that encourage college students to drink responsibly. While the messages might be really clever and convincing, they’re posted at the campus health center, far away from the frat houses or other places where students actually drink. So while students may agree with the message when they read it, unless they are triggered to think about it when they are actually drinking, the message is unlikely to change behavior.

Triggers even shed light on when negative word of mouth has positive effects. Economist Alan Sorensen, Scott Rasmussen, and I
analyzed hundreds of
New York Times
book reviews to see how positive and negative reviews affected book sales.

In contrast to the notion that any publicity is good publicity, negative reviews hurt sales for some books. But for books by new
or relatively unknown authors, negative reviews increased sales by 45 percent. A book called
Fierce People
, for example, got a terrible review. The
Times
noted that the author “does not have a particularly sharp eye” and complained that “the change in tone is so abrupt that the dissonance it creates is almost distasteful.” Yet sales more than quadrupled after the review.

Triggers explain why. Even a bad review or negative word of mouth can increase sales if it informs or reminds people that the product or idea exists. That’s why a sixty-dollar Tuscan red wine saw sales rise by 5 percent after a prominent wine website described it as “redolent of stinky socks.” It’s also one reason why the Shake Weight, a vibrating dumbbell that was widely ridiculed by the media and consumers, went on to do $50 million in sales. Even negative attention can be useful if it makes products and ideas top of mind.

KIT KAT AND COFFEE: GROWING THE HABITAT

One product that used triggers brilliantly is Kit Kat.

“Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar!” Introduced in the United States in 1986,
the Kit Kat tune is one of the most iconic jingles ever made. Sing the first couple of words to almost anyone over twenty-five and the person can finish the line. Researchers even deemed it
one of the top ten “earworms”—a melody that gets stuck in your head—of all time. Even more memorable than “YMCA” (take that, Village People).

But in 2007, Colleen Chorak was tasked with reviving the Kit Kat brand. In the twenty-plus years since the jingle was first introduced, the brand had run out of gas. Hershey produces everything from Reese’s Pieces and Hershey’s Kisses to Almond
Joy, Twizzlers, and Jolly Ranchers. With this huge slate of different items, it’s not surprising that a brand can get lost. And that is exactly what had happened with Kit Kat. Hershey had floundered with replacing the “give me a break” campaign. Sales were declining around 5 percent a year, and the brand had contracted considerably. People still loved the product, but consumer interest was way down.

Colleen needed a way to get consumers to start thinking about the brand again. To make Kit Kat more top of mind. And given the years of failed new directions, upper management was unwilling to spend the money to put the brand back on TV. Any financial support would be modest at best.

So she did some research. Colleen looked at when people actually consumed Kit Kats. She found two things: consumers often ate Kit Kats to take a break, and many consumed it in coordination with a hot beverage.

She had an idea.

Kit Kat and coffee.

Colleen pulled the campaign together in a matter of months. Described as “a break’s best friend,” the radio spots featured the candy bar sitting on a counter next to a cup of coffee, or someone grabbing coffee and asking for a Kit Kat. Kit Kat and coffee. Coffee and Kit Kat. The spots repeatedly paired the two together.

The campaign was a hit.

By the end of the year it had lifted sales by 8 percent. After twelve months, sales were up by a third. Kit Kat and coffee put Kit Kat back on the map. The then-$300 million brand has since grown to $500 million.

Many things contributed to the campaign’s success. “Kit Kat and coffee” has a nice alliteration, and the idea of taking a break
to have a Kit Kat fits well with the existing notion of a coffee break. But I’d like to add one more reason to the list.

Triggers. “Kit Kat and cantaloupe” is equally alliterative, and break dancing would also have fitted with the break concept. But coffee is a particularly good thing to link the brand to because it is a
frequent
stimulus in the environment. A huge number of people drink coffee. Many drink it a number of times throughout the day. And so by linking Kit Kat to coffee, Colleen created a frequent trigger to remind people of the brand.

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Biologists often talk about plants and animals as having habitats, natural environments that contain all necessary elements for sustaining an organism’s life. Ducks need water and grasses to eat. Deer thrive in areas that contain open spaces for grazing.

Products and
ideas also have habitats, or sets of triggers that cause people to think about them.

Take hot dogs. Barbecues, summertime, baseball games, and even wiener dogs (dachshunds) are just a few of the triggers that make up the habitat for hot dogs.

Compare that with the habitat for Ethiopian food. What triggers most people to think of Ethiopian food? Ethiopian food is certainly delicious, but its habitat is not as prevalent.

Most products or ideas have a number of natural triggers. Mars bars and Mars the planet are already naturally connected. The Mars company didn’t need to do anything to create that link. Likewise, French music is a natural trigger for French wine, and the last day of the workweek is a natural trigger for Rebecca Black’s song “Friday.”

But it’s also possible to grow an idea’s habitat by creating new links to stimuli in the environment. Kit Kat wouldn’t
normally be associated with coffee, but through repeated pairing, Colleen Chorak was able to link the two. Similarly, our trays experiment created a link between dining-room trays and a message to eat fruits and vegetables by repeatedly pairing the two ideas together. And by increasing the habitat for the message, these newly formed links helped the desired behavior catch on.

Consider
an experiment we conducted with BzzAgent and Boston Market. This fast-casual restaurant is best known for home-style comfort food (rotisserie chicken and mashed potatoes) and was primarily viewed as a lunch place. Management wanted to generate more buzz. We thought we could help by growing Boston Market’s habitat.

During a six-week campaign, some people were exposed to messages that repeatedly paired the restaurant with dinner. “Thinking about dinner? Think about Boston Market!”. Other people received a similar advertising campaign that contained a more generic message: “Thinking about a place to eat? Think about Boston Market!” We then measured how often the respective groups talked about the restaurant.