Tips & Tricks to Make Your Marketing Popular

Here are below my takeaways of the book "Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age" by Jonah Berger.

This book provides cutting-edge science about how word of mouth and social transmission work. And how you can leverage them to make your products and ideas succeed. Jonah Berger's research is based on a combination of empirical studies, experiments, and data analysis.

The key finding of the book is that a product or idea can be made contagious by following the 6 principles of contagiousness summarized under the acronym STEPPS: Social Currency, Triggers, Emotions, Public, Practical Value, Stories.

This book is packed with fundamental principles and actionable insights on word of mouth and social transmission that any marketing leader can draw inspiration from for their content.

Happy reading!

6 principles of contagiousness summarized under the acronym STEPPS:

Social Currency

• How does it make people look to talk about a product? - It's about experience and remarkability.
• People share things that make them look good to others.
• Three ways to make people look good while promoting your products: 1. Find inner remarkability; 2. Leverage game mechanics; 3. Make people feel like insiders.
• Remarkability: Think about what makes the product or idea interesting, surprising, or novel. You can find the inner remarkability in any product or idea by thinking about what makes that thing stand out.
• Game mechanics: Good game mechanics keep people engaged, motivated, and always wanting more. Tangible evidence of one's progress makes one feel good. People don’t just care about how they are doing, they care about their performances versus others. For example, airlines have done this nicely with frequent flier programs. Game mechanics help generate social currency because doing well makes us look good. People talk because they want to show off their achievements, but along the way they also talk about the brands or products that helped them achieve.
• Make people feel like insiders: Use scarcity and exclusivity to make customers feel like insiders. Both boost word of mouth by making people feel like insiders. Having insider knowledge is social currency.
• Ask yourself: Does talking about your product or idea make people look good? Can you find the inner remarkability? Can you leverage game mechanics? Can you make people feel like insiders?

Triggers

• How do you remind people to talk about your products?
• Think about whether your message will be triggered by the everyday environments of the target audience.
• Top of mind, tip of tongue.
• Ask yourself: What cues make people think about your product or idea? How can you grow the habitat to make it come to mind more often?

Emotions

• Craft messages that make people feel something.
• When someone is inspired by great knowledge, beauty, or sublimity, it’s what we call the “awe emotion”. The awe emotion will trigger positive high arousal, which leads people to share. Adding more arousal to a story or ad can have a big impact on people’s willingness to share it.
• When we care, we share.
• Ask yourself: Does talking about your product or idea generate emotions? How can you kindle the fire?

Public (Social Proof)

• Can people see when others are using your product?
• If it’s hard to see what others are doing, it’s hard to imitate them. 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.
• People often imitate those around them. People imitate, in part, because others’ choices provide information. To help resolve our uncertainty, we often look at what other people are doing and follow that. We assume that if other people are doing something, it must be a good idea. They probably know something we don’t.
• The famous phrase “Monkey see, monkey do” captures more than just the human penchant for imitation. People can imitate only when they can see what others are doing.
• Ask yourself: Does your product or idea advertise itself? Can people see when others are using it? If not, how can you make the private public?

Practical Value

• Package your knowledge or expertise.
• Something that is frequently shared is useful information helping people do things they want to do, faster, better, and easier. Practically valuable information not only is useful, but also demonstrates the company's knowledge and expertise in this domain. Practical value is about helping, and people like to help one another.
• News you can use.
• Ask yourself: Does talking about your product or idea help people help others? How can you highlight incredible value, packaging your knowledge and expertise into useful information others will want to disseminate?

Stories

• Embed your products in stories that people want to tell.
• Stories can act as vessels, carriers that help transmit information to others. You need to build a narrative that people will share, while talking about your product or idea along the way.
• A problem might be creating content that is unrelated to the product or idea it’s meant to promote. There’s a big difference between people talking about the content and people talking about the company, organization, or person that created that content. The key, then, is to not only make something viral, but also make it valuable to the sponsoring company or organization. Not just virality but valuable virality.
• Virality is most valuable when the brand or product benefit is integral to the story. When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it.
• Make sure you think about valuable virality. Make sure the information you want people to remember and transmit is critical to the narrative. Sure, you can make your narrative funny, surprising, or entertaining. But if people don’t connect the content back to you, it’s not going to help you very much. Even if it goes viral.
• Make sure your desired information is so embedded into the plot that people can’t tell the story without it.
• Ask yourself: Is your product or idea embedded in a broader narrative that people want to share? Is the story not only viral, but also valuable?

To make a product or idea contagious, incorporate the key STEPPS principles. Even using a few of them can harness social influence and word of mouth to ensure it catches on.