[Book 47] Contagious by Jonah Berger

Contagious reveals the forces that make things go viral and guides us towards achieving organic growth. We share great ideas, products and experiences that are useful, funny and cool because sharing primes our audience to associate these desirable attributes with us. We also deeply connect with services that make us feel like insiders. Special, limited experiences are seen as valuable and are more likely to be shared with like-minded friends or colleagues.

Jonah explains that viral ideas carry the right emotional charge. We enhance emotional experiences by sharing with others, whether it’s from finally achieving a long-standing goal, or getting support when dealing with a loss. The key to virality is to stimulate high arousal emotions (e.g., awe, excitement, or anger) rather than low arousal (e.g., contentment or sadness). High arousal emotions drive people to action, including sharing the source of the emotion.

Finally, contagious ideas are encoded in clear stories. The stories that stand the test of time (think fables) have underlying, still-relevant lessons. When bringing a product or service to market, it’s crucial to have purposeful stories that quickly and memorably resonate with clients.

This book has helped me connect the usefulness of business ideas with the emotional experience of the end user. The adoption of a business idea is often predicated on how effectively we drive excitement with various audiences: first senior leadership for buy-in, then business partners for implementation and finally end customers to use or buy.

You should read this book if you…

• want to improve how you connect with customers
• seek to increase the marketability and spread of your ideas
• are interested in the forces that drive viral ideas

Additional Information

Year Published: 2013
Book Ranking (from 1-10): 8 – Very Good – In depth insights on a specific topic
Ease of Read (from 1-5): 3 – Average

Key Highlights

1. 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
2. Emotional things often get shared. So rather than harping on function, we need to focus on feelings
3. So we need to build our own Trojan horses, embedding our products and ideas in stories that people want to tell. But we need to do more than just tell a great story. We need to make virality valuable. We need to make our message so integral to the narrative that people can’t tell the story without it
4. Making people feel like insiders can benefit all types of products and ideas. Regardless of whether the product is hip and cool, or a mix of leftover pig parts. The mere fact that something isn’t readily available can make people value it more and tell others to capitalize on the social currency of knowing about it or having it
5. Two reasons people might share things are that they are interesting and that they are useful
6. Emotion sharing is thus a bit like social glue, maintaining and strengthening relationships. Even if we’re not in the same place, the fact that we both feel the same way bonds us together
7. Once we realized the important role that emotional arousal might play, we returned to our data. Just to recap, so far we had found that awe increased sharing and that sadness decreased it. But rather than finding a simple matter of positive emotions increasing sharing and negative emotions decreasing it, we found that some negative emotions, like anger or anxiety, actually increased sharing. Would physiological arousal be the key to the puzzle? It was
8. If it’s hard to see what others are doing, it’s hard to imitate it. Making something more observable makes it easier to imitate. Thus a key factor in driving products to catch on is public visibility. If something is built to show, it’s built to grow
9. All these examples involve products that advertise themselves. Every time people use the product or service they also transmit social proof or passive approval because usage is observable
10. So what was driving them to talk? The answer is simple. People like to pass along practical, useful information
11. Stories solve this problem. They provide a quick and easy way for people to acquire lots of knowledge in a vivid and engaging fashion. One good story about a mechanic who fixed the problem without charging is worth dozens of observations and years of trial and error. Stories save time and hassle and give people the information they need in a way that’s easy to remember