Contagious: Why Things Catch On (3 page)

ARE SOME THINGS JUST BORN WORD-OF-MOUTH WORTHY?

Now at this point you might be saying to yourself, great, some things are more contagious than others. But is it possible to make anything contagious, or are some things just naturally more infectious?

Smartphones tend to be more exciting than tax returns, talking dogs are more interesting than tort reform, and Hollywood movies are cooler than toasters or blenders.

Are makers of the former just better off than the latter? Are some products and ideas just born contagious while others aren’t? Or can any product or idea be engineered to be more infectious?

—————

Tom Dickson was looking for a new job. Born in San Francisco, he was led by his Mormon faith to attend school at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City, where he graduated in 1971 with a degree in engineering. He moved home after graduation, but the job market was tough and there weren’t many opportunities. The only position he could find was at a company making
birth control and intrauterine devices. These devices helped prevent pregnancy, but they could also be seen as abortives, which went against Tom’s Mormon beliefs. A Mormon helping to develop new methods of birth control? It was time to find something new.

Tom had always been interested in bread making. While practicing his hobby, he noticed that there were no good cheap home grinders with which to make flour. So Tom put his engineering skills to work. After playing around with a ten-dollar vacuum motor, he cobbled together something that milled finer flour at a cheaper price than anything currently on the market.

The grinder was so good that Tom started producing it on a larger scale. The business did reasonably well, and playing around with different methods of processing food got him interested in more general blenders. Soon he moved back to Utah to start his own blender company. In 1995 he produced his first home blender, and
in 1999 Blendtec was founded.

But although the product was great, no one really knew about it. Awareness was low. So in 2006, Tom hired George Wright, another BYU alum, as his marketing director. Later, George would joke that the marketing budget at his prior company was greater than all of Blendtec’s revenues.

On one of his first days on the job, George noticed a pile of sawdust on the floor of the manufacturing plant. Given that no construction was in progress, George was puzzled. What was going on?

It turned out that Tom was in the factory doing what he did every day: trying to break blenders. To test the durability and power of Blendtec blenders, Tom would cram two-by-two boards, among other objects, into the blenders and turn them on—hence the sawdust.

George had an idea that would make Tom’s blender famous.

With a meager fifty-dollar budget (not fifty million or even fifty thousand), George went out and bought marbles, golf balls, and a rake. He also purchased a white lab coat for Tom, just like what a laboratory scientist would wear. Then he put Tom and a blender in front of a camera. George asked Tom to do exactly what he had done with the two-by-twos: see if they would blend.

Imagine taking a handful of marbles and tossing them into your home blender. Not the cheap kind of marbles made of plastic or clay, but the real ones. The half-inch orbs made out of solid glass. So strong that they could withstand a car driving over them.

That is exactly what Tom did. He dropped fifty glass marbles in one of his blenders and hit the button for slow churn. The marbles bounced furiously around the blender, making
rat-tat-tat
noises like a hailstorm on the roof of a car.

Tom waited fifteen seconds and then stopped the blender. He cautiously lifted the top as white smoke poured out: glass dust. All that was left of the marbles was a fine powder that looked like flour. Rather than cracking from the punishment, the blender had flexed its muscles. Golf balls were pulverized, and the rake was reduced to a pile of slivers. George posted the videos on YouTube and crossed his fingers.

His intuition was right. People were amazed. They loved the videos. They were surprised at the blender’s power and called it everything from “insanely awesome” to “the ultimate blender.” Some couldn’t even believe that what they were seeing was possible. Others wondered what else the blender could pulverize. Computer hard drives? A samurai sword?

In the first week the videos racked up 6 million views. Tom and George had hit a viral home run.

Tom went on to blend everything from Bic lighters to Nintendo Wii controllers. He’s tried glow sticks, Justin Bieber CDs, and even an iPhone. Not only did Blendtec blenders demolish all these objects, but their video series, titled
Will It Blend?
, received more than 300 million views. Within two years the campaign increased retail blender sales 700 percent. All from videos made for less than a few hundred dollars apiece. And for a product that seemed anything but word-of-mouth worthy. A regular, boring old blender.

—————

The Blendtec story demonstrates one of the key takeaways of contagious content. Virality isn’t born, it’s made.

And that is good news indeed.

Some people are lucky. Their ideas or initiatives happen to be things that seem to naturally generate lots of excitement and buzz.

But as the Blendtec story shows, even regular everyday products and ideas can generate lots of word-of-mouth if someone figures out the right way to do it. Regardless of how plain or boring a product or idea may seem, there are ways to make it contagious.

So how can we design products, ideas, and behaviors so that people will talk about them?

STUDYING SOCIAL INFLUENCE

My path to studying social epidemics was anything but direct. My parents didn’t believe in sweets or television for their children, and instead gave us educational rewards. One holiday season I remember being particularly excited to get a book of logic puzzles, which I explored incessantly over the next few months. These
experiences fostered an interest in math and science, and after doing a research project in high school on urban hydrology (how the composition of a stream’s watershed affects its shape), I went to college thinking I would become an environmental engineer.

But something funny happened in college. While sitting in one of my “hard” science classes, I started to wonder if I could apply the same toolkit to study complex social phenomena. I had always liked people-watching, and when I did happen to watch TV, I enjoyed it more for the ads than the programs. But I realized that rather than just abstractly musing about why people did things, I could apply the scientific method to find out the answers. The same research tools used in biology and chemistry could be used to understand social influence and interpersonal communication.

So I started taking psychology and sociology courses and got involved in research on how people perceive themselves and others. A few years in, my grandmother sent me a review of a new book she thought I might find interesting. It was called
The Tipping Point.

I loved the book and read everything related I could find. But I kept being frustrated by a singular issue. The ideas in that book were amazingly powerful, but they were mainly descriptive. Sure some things catch on, but why? What was the underlying human behavior that drove these outcomes? These were interesting questions that needed answers. I decided to start finding them.

—————

After completing my PhD and more than a decade of research, I’ve discovered some answers. I’ve spent the last ten years, most recently as a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the
University of Pennsylvania, studying this and related questions. With an incredible array of collaborators I’ve examined things like

• Why certain
New York Times
articles or YouTube videos go viral

• Why some products get more word of mouth

• Why certain political messages spread

• When and why certain baby names catch on or die out

• When negative publicity increases, versus decreases, sales

We’ve analyzed hundreds of years of baby names, thousands of
New York Times
articles, and millions of car purchases. We’ve spent thousands of hours collecting, coding, and analyzing everything from brands and YouTube videos to urban legends, product reviews, and face-to-face conversations. All with the goal of understanding social influence and what drives certain things to become popular.

A few years ago, I started teaching a course at Wharton called “Contagious.” The premise was simple. Whether you’re in marketing, politics, engineering, or public health, you need to understand how to make your products and ideas catch on. Brand managers want their products to get more buzz. Politicians want their ideas to diffuse throughout the population. Health officials want people to cook rather than eat fast food. Hundreds of undergraduates, MBAs, and executives have taken the class and learned about how social influence drives products, ideas, and behaviors to succeed.

Every so often I’d get e-mails from people who couldn’t take the class. They’d heard about it from a friend and liked the material but had a scheduling conflict or didn’t find out about it in time. So they asked if there was a book they could read to catch them up on what they missed.

There are certainly some great books out there.
The Tipping Point
is a fantastic read. But while it is filled with entertaining stories, the science has come a long way since it was released over a decade ago.
Made to Stick
, by Chip and Dan Heath, is another favorite of mine (full disclosure: Chip was my mentor in graduate school, so the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree). It weaves together clever stories with academic research on cognitive psychology and human memory. But although the Heaths’ book focuses on making ideas “stick”—getting people to remember them—it says less about how to make products and ideas
spread
, or getting people to pass them on.

So whenever people asked to read something about what drives word of mouth, I would direct them to the various academic papers I and others had published in the area. Inevitably, some people would e-mail back to say thanks but request something more “accessible.” In other words, something that was rigorous but less dry than the typical jargon-laden articles published in academic journals. A book that provided them with research-based principles for understanding what makes things catch on.

This is that book.

SIX PRINCIPLES OF CONTAGIOUSNESS

This book explains what makes content contagious. By “content,” I mean stories, news, and information. Products and ideas, messages and videos. Everything from fund-raising at the local public radio station to the safe-sex messages we’re trying to teach our kids. By “contagious,” I mean likely to spread. To diffuse from person to person via word of mouth and social influence. To be talked about, shared, or imitated by consumers, coworkers, and constituents.

In our research, my collaborators and I noticed some common themes, or attributes, across a range of contagious content. A recipe, if you will, for making products, ideas, and behaviors more likely to become popular.

Take
Will It Blend?
and the hundred-dollar cheesesteak at Barclay Prime. Both stories evoke emotions like surprise or amazement: Who would have thought a blender could tear through an iPhone, or that a cheesesteak would cost anywhere near a hundred dollars? Both stories are also pretty remarkable, so they make the teller look cool for passing them on. And both offer useful information: it’s always helpful to know about products that work well or restaurants that have great food.

Just as recipes often call for sugar to make something sweet, we kept finding the same ingredients in ads that went viral, news articles that were shared, or products that received lots of word of mouth.

After analyzing hundreds of contagious messages, products, and ideas, we noticed that the same six “ingredients,” or principles, were often at work. Six key STEPPS, as I call them, that cause things to be talked about, shared, and imitated.

Principle 1: Social Currency

How does it make people look to talk about a product or idea? Most people would rather look smart than dumb, rich than poor, and cool than geeky. Just like the clothes we wear and the cars we drive, what we talk about influences how others see us. It’s social currency. Knowing about cool things—like a blender that can tear through an iPhone—makes people seem sharp and in the know. So to get people talking we need to craft messages that help them achieve these desired impressions. We need to find our inner remarkability and make people feel like insiders.
We need to leverage game mechanics to give people ways to achieve and provide visible symbols of status that they can show to others.

Principle 2: Triggers

How do we remind people to talk about our products and ideas? Triggers are stimuli that prompt people to think about related things. Peanut butter reminds us of jelly and the word “dog” reminds us of the word “cat.” If you live in Philadelphia, seeing a cheesesteak might remind you of the hundred-dollar one at Barclay Prime. People often talk about whatever comes to mind, so the more often people think about a product or idea, the more it will be talked about. We need to design products and ideas that are frequently triggered by the environment and create new triggers by linking our products and ideas to prevalent cues in that environment. Top of mind leads to tip of tongue.

Principle 3: Emotion

When we care, we share. So how can we craft messages and ideas that make people feel something? Naturally contagious content usually evokes some sort of emotion. Blending an iPhone is surprising. A potential tax hike is infuriating. Emotional things often get shared. So rather than harping on function, we need to focus on feelings. But as we’ll discuss, some emotions increase sharing, while others actually decrease it. So we need to pick the right emotions to evoke. We need to kindle the fire. Sometimes even negative emotions may be useful.