Contagious: Why Things Catch On | Jonah Berger | Talks at Google

JONAH BERGER: So I want to start with a very simple question. These are three products and brands that most of you in the audience are probably quite familiar with. So on the left we have Walt Disney World, the self-described place where dreams come true; in the middle, we have Honey Nut Cheerios, the delicious breakfast cereal, which may or may not cure your cholesterol; and on the right we have Scrubbing Bubbles, the bathroom cleaner. So if you had to guess, which of these three products do you think gets the most word of mouth? Is it Disney

World, Cheerios, or Scrubbing Bubbles? And I'm actually going to ask everybody to vote. So you want to take a first guess? AUDIENCE: I'd say Scrubbing Bubbles. JONAH BERGER: Scrubbing Bubbles. How many people want to vote for Scrubbing Bubbles? OK. Good. Somebody else want to take a different vote? Yeah. AUDIENCE: Disney World. JONAH BERGER: Disney World. How people want to go with Disney? OK. Good. Anybody else? That's it. OK. AUDIENCE: I gotta say Cheerios. JONAH BERGER: Okay, you'll say Cheerios. You'll be the brave soul. OK, good. AUDIENCE: Come on Cheerios. JONAH BERGER: Cheerios. Good. I got

a couple of people for Cheerios. So I want to point out two things in this. First, I don't think we know the answer. So we went around, about, I'd say about 45% of the folks were for Scrubbing Bubbles, about 45% were for Disney World. So we're pretty evenly split among those two. So we're not really sure of the answer. But second, if we did have to guess-- so how many people guessed Disney World? That is a really good guess. It's wrong, but good guess. Scrubbing Bubbles? Also an excellent guess, also wrong. So the gentleman over

here who is nice enough to stick his neck out for me, I appreciate it, is actually-- Cheerios gets more word of mouth than Disney World and Scrubbing Bubbles. And this is just one example. But I think it points to a broader question, which is why do some products and ideas get talked about more than others? You probably heard that word of mouth is really important, as we'll talk about in next couple minutes. It's more important than advertising. But to make it work, we have to understand why people talk about some things rather than others. If

we want people to talk about our product or idea, we have to understand the science or the psychology behind social transmission. And so that's what I'm going to talk about today. My name is Jonah Berger. I'm a professor at the Wharton School, I have this book called "Contagious," which is coming out tomorrow. I have heard that they've been nice enough to get some of them for you guys at a reduced cost. But they're actually unfortunately not here today. So if you're interested, they'll be here tomorrow apparently or you can get it on Amazon or anywhere

else you want. It'll be in stores tomorrow. I'm excited to actually physically see it in the store. So tomorrow will be exciting day. Also, everything I'm going to talk about today is research based. It would be great to be a social media guru. I think it's a really fun job. Apparently, all you have to do is make guesses about what's true. You don't have to back it up with data and you just get to write about it. And that sounds fantastic. But that's actually not my job. Wharton would not pay me if I did that.

So all this is based on academic research that we and others have done in the past decade or so. It's all up on my website. If you're interested, please go check it out. And that'll sort of fill in a lot of the gaps from what I'm going to talk about today. So just to start us out with that idea that word of mouth is important, McKinsey, none other than McKinsey, because people believe what McKinsey says, has said that word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising in categories as diverse as skin

care and mobile phones. And this probably doesn't come as a big surprise to folks in the audience, but a lot of research in the past decade or so has shown that word of mouth has a big causal impact on sales. Everything you can imagine, from online book reviews, so a five-star review, increases the number of books sold by about 20, to offline word of mouth for restaurants and a whole host of other products. Why do you think that word of mouth is so much more effective than advertising, if you had to guess? Yeah? AUDIENCE: It's

usually a trusted source. JONAH BERGER: OK. So we don't really believe advertising. Advertisers say hey, 9 out of 10 dentists love this toothpaste. You say hold on. Really? 9 out of 10 dentists. I don't know about that. You never see an ad that says 1 out of 10 dentists like this toothpaste, right? So you don't trust ads, but you trust your friends. Your friends usually have your best interests at heart. They're going to help you. That's good. That's one reason. The other reason is word of mouth is much more targeted. And now with digital ad

targeting, a lot of the good work that Google's doing, it's easier to target people. But it's still really hard to be exactly sure what someone is interested in and when they might be interested in that thing. So if you sell skis for example, well maybe you say, OK, I'm going to buy some words related to skis on keywords. That'll get you sort of close. Because it may not be still people who are looking to buy skis. Maybe you get buy skis and that's even closer. Or you average in a ski magazine, but a whole bunch

of people who are reading that magazine might not actually be in the market for skis at the moment. So what word of mouth does is it's really, really targeted. So if you don't have a baby, no one's going to tell you about baby products. If you don't like spicy food, no one's going to talk to you about a restaurant that has really great spicy food. Word of mouth is like a searchlight that works through your social network to find the person that might be most interested in a particular product or idea. So a really nice

example of this that happened to me a couple years ago, publishers often send academics books in the mail. They're hoping that we'll read those books and assign them to our classes. And so I got a book in the mail from a publisher. But they didn't actually send one, they actually sent two books, two copies of the same book. Now let me tell you, the second copy is not any better than the first. It was the exact same book. So why would they do that? Well, they sent that second book and they said Professor Berger, we

think you'll like this book. And if you do, please share it with a friend of yours might like it as well. And so that's this old sociological idea of homophily. We tend to be friends of people that are similar to us. If you like football, you tend to have friends who like football. If you like opera, you tend to have friends that like opera. And so if you like something, you probably know other people that would like that as well. And that's the targeting benefit of word of mouth and social media more generally, finding people

that are going to interested in it, who can help you find other people that are interested in it. That's why the referral benefits are so useful. The customer lifetime value of customers referred through social networks is much higher than traditional customers because it helps people find the people that will be most interested. OK, great. So we like word of mouth. Let's jump on the bandwagon. How do we get it? And indeed, there's been a lot of interest lately in social media channels. If you had to guess though, how much word of mouth do you think

is over social media? So it's over things like Facebook, like Twitter, online interviews. What percent of word of mouth is online, compared to offline being face to face? AUDIENCE: 20. JONAH BERGER: 20. 20. AUDIENCE: 25. JONAH BERGER: 25. AUDIENCE: 5. JONAH BERGER: 5. We'll do--- AUDIENCE: 40. JONAH BERGER: 40. I feel like auctioneer up here. 10? Do I hear 20, 25, 30, 30? It's actually 7. So not 70, not 17, 7. So the 5 was pretty close. And if we think about why that is though, we can think about why we think there's so much

online word of mouth. Hardly a the day goes by where we see an article, like we don't see an article about it in the paper, oh Facebook is doing this, Twitter is doing this, Google+ is doing this. There's some new site we need to pay attention to. And further there's a record of all the things we share online. We can go back and look at those things we shared. But if you think about what you did in the five or 10 minutes before you were waiting for me to talk or even when you were out

in the hallway, you were probably talking to someone else and you were probably talking face to face. You don't sit in a meeting and tweet back and forth to each other. You have a face-to-face conversation. And so much more word of mouth is actually offline. And I think the second problem with focusing so much on these is we think about the technology rather than the psychology. So everyone probably remembers Myspace. A few years ago, you could have decided you're going to be a Myspace expert. You're going to put all your eggs in the basket of

Myspace, understand how it works. That's great. And now how useful would that expertise be? AUDIENCE: Not really. JONAH BERGER: Not really, right? We've moved on to something else. And so if Facebook is here in 10 years, maybe, maybe not. Twitter is here in 10 years, maybe, maybe not. A couple of years ago, it was Foursquare was the new hot thing. Now, everyone's talking about Pinterest. Technologies will come and go. Why people share things will pretty much stay the same, the same psychological drivers of sharing. And so we need to understand why people talk and share.

And that brings me to this picture. This is a cat playing a turntable. It's not actually a turntable. It's a sort of cat scratching post. But anyone have any idea why I have this in my talk? Why a talk on virality has to have a picture of cats in it. What? AUDIENCE: People share them a lot. JONAH BERGER: Yeah. So there's a theory out there that people share things because they have pictures of cats in them. So you go on the web, one of the most prevalent theories oh, why do things go viral? Because of

cats. So this cat picture is fantastic. It's got to go viral because it has cats in it. Now, obviously that logic is flawed. It's flawed for a couple reasons. First, it's like noticing that Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and Bill Cosby are all famous. And so you decide to name your child Bill because well, getting the name Bill must be the route to fame and fortune. Certainly, there are some kind cat videos that are great, right? That are very viral, that people share. But that doesn't explain why some are shared and others aren't. And it doesn't

tell us anything about non-cat videos, most other things that's shared on the web. So I'm actually going to put an X unfortunately through this cute picture of a cat playing on a turntable. And instead, I'm going to put this up. And this is supposed to be science. I couldn't find a better image for science. But this is what I would call science. So we've studied things like why "New York Times" articles go viral. We've gotten all the articles released by "The New York Times" over a six-month period, over 7,000 articles, to look at why certain

articles make the most emailed list and why others don't. We've analyze over 500 products and brands to look at why certain products get more word of mouth than others. We've looked at YouTube videos, a whole host of different types of content. And based on these insights we've seen again and again that certain principles both drive people to talk and share. Unfortunately, it's not cats. But these principles can help us explain why cats and a broad variety of things are talked about and share. And so what I'm going to do today is share a little bit

of the insights from the book. And the book has a framework in it. And what it is essentially is a recipe, a recipe for engineering content to make it more viral or talkable. And people at this point usually say well, hold on. Can you guarantee that something will go viral? We can't guarantee that something will go viral. I can't guarantee that by reading this book you will be the next "Gangnam Style" with a billion views. That's what everyone wants to know. But what I can guarantee is more people will talk about and share your idea.

A useful analogy here sort of like a batting average. Can you guarantee you're going to hit a home run every time? No. But to the degree you can improve your batting average, you're increasing the chance that you get a hit each time. That's what these principles can do. They can increase the chance that people talk about and share your ideas. From 9 people to 10 people, from-- if you think about a virality coefficient, the viral coefficient, getting that number up above 1. And so what I'm going to talk about is how to craft contagious content.

By content, I both mean the messages we wrap around our products, but also how we build the products themselves for viral growth. Thinking how to make the products more talkable and shareable and how we design both websites, as well as the product themselves, to be something people will pass on. By contagious, I mean that old idea of spreading from person to person, just like a virus might. But the first idea here is actually the most important one, the first word, and that is the word craft. So you might think that you can only do this

for certain types of products. So someone this weekend shared Google Glass with me, Google Glass, Glasses, Glass, Glasses? Glass, really a cool product. That is a naturally remarkable product that people are going to talk up because it has some of these characters naturally. But you might say, hold on. I'm working on a product that not that exciting. So I do exec ad sessions sometimes where someone will, say I sell cement. How can I make people talk about and share cement? And what I'm going to talk about is how these same ideas can be used to

sell cement, toilet paper, network software, whatever you want. Pick your most boring product, by following these principles you can craft that product or that idea to make it more talkable or shareable. And finally, the last thing I want to say here is quite important. We're going focus in our next few minutes that we have left on the message, not the messenger. So how many of you heard the idea of influentials, or opinion leaders, or mavens, connectors, salesmen, those sorts of ideas? So that's a really compelling idea. So about a decade ago, Malcolm Gladwell came out

with a famous book called "The Tipping Point," great book, extremely well written. But about half of what is in that book is wrong. And many in the audience probably have realized that already. My job as an academic is to figure out what's right there and what's wrong. And we focus so much on special people, the messenger of our ideas, we said if we can just find those hipsters in the East Village and get them our product, well we're done. Then it's going to catch on. But by focusing so much on the messenger, we've ignored something

else that's really, really important and that is the message. Lots of people don't have millions of friends or millions of followers, yet they talk about and share things all the time. And so we need to understand the psychology of talking and sharing to make people share our stuff, whether they have 10 friends or 10,000, whether they're really persuasive or not persuasive at all. It's sort of like thinking about the difference between jokes and joke tellers. So we probably all have a friend who's a really good joke teller. When they tell a joke at the party,

everybody laughs. But there are certain jokes that are funny regardless of who tells them. And that's a difference between the message and the messenger. How we can create content that people are going to share regardless of who's doing the sharing. So there are six key STEPPS in the book. Each of these is a research-based principal. I'll talk about that recipe, one of the ingredients in the recipe for talking and sharing. I don't have time today to talk about all of them. But I'll pick maybe one or two, depending on how much time we have, and

see how many we get through. I'll pick a fun one that relates to you guys, I think. So I think I'll talk about triggers. But I'll give you a sense of what the others are. And if you're interested, there's a whole fantastic book out there that you can read to find out about the rest of them. So I won't talk about social currency. I will talk about triggers and maybe I'll talk about stories, depending if there's time. How many of you guys know about Please Don't Tell, by the way? A couple people. If you don't

know about Please Don't Tell, ask someone who raised their hand. It's a great example of this principle called social currency. I talk about it in the book. But basically, people talk about and share things to make them look good. I'll tell you, you know what, I'll tell you the Please Don't Tell story. Because it's a good one and it's a New York one. So imagine you're down in the Village one weekend, maybe it's this weekend. It's Saturday afternoon. You're looking for something to eat, you're hungry, you're hanging out with your friends, when you notice a

hot dog restaurant. It seems pretty cool. You like hot dogs. You walk downstairs inside to this place called Crif Dogs, a delicious hot dog restaurant, gingham tablecloths, huge menu in the back to die for. It's got a breakfast hot dog with eggs, bacon, and cheese; another hot dog with green onions and pineapple on top, sort of interesting flavors; and the traditional New York water dog, with ketchup and mustard. So you're sitting there. You're enjoying your hot dog. You finish it. When you notice over in the corner here is what looks like a phone booth, sort

of what Clark Kent would change into to turn into Superman. So you say, I haven't been in a phone in a long time. They're sort of endangered species nowadays. Let me go check it out. So you walk over, you slide open the doors, and you walk inside this phone booth. It's a little cramped, tight space. But you notice on the wall is a phone. And it's not a recent, sort of payphone looking thing. It's a rotary dial phone. Ones you have to stick your finger in and dial around in a circle. Just for kicks, hold

the phone to your ear and dial the number 2. And someone will pick up the other line and they will ask you whether you have a reservation. Reservation, I'm in a phone booth inside of a hot dog restaurant. What would I have a reservation for? But if you're lucky and they have space, the back of this will open and you'll be let into a secret bar called Please Don't Tell. Now, for those who have of Please Don't Tell, it's a fun experience. I've been there a couple times myself. But they have violated a lot of

traditional laws of marketing. There's no sign on the street. There's no sign in the restaurant. They have made it really hard to get into. Yet they've never advertised and if you've ever tried to call there, you know it's really hard to get a reservation. Phones open at 3:00 PM for that day. By 3:30, they're all gone. People hit redial again and again to try to get through. Really hard to get through, so many people calling. So what did they do to make them successful? Well if you notice, they did something really cute. They made themselves

a secret. And if you think about secrets, someone tells you a secret, what's the first thing you do with that information? AUDIENCE: You tell everyone. JONAH BERGER: You tell everyone else. They tell you not to tell and what do you do, you turn around and you tell someone else. Because the fact that it seems like a secret makes that information seem better and it makes you look really good by sharing it. You go to that cool bar, you tell someone else about it, you look like you're an insider. You look like you're in the know.

And that's this idea of social currency. Just like the car we drive and the clothes we wear, the things we say affect how other people see us. And so we talk about and share things that give us status by association. Things like cool bars, but also cool information of restaurants that make us look smart and in the know. I won't share this. I'll skip this. I was going to show you guys-- have seen Will It Blend? Yeah, people have seen it blend. OK, I'll skip that one then, because that's sort of fun. We'll talk about

triggers though and then I'll open it up to questions. Triggers is I think-- social currency is a little pretty intuitive concept. Triggers are a little bit more counterintuitive. Everyone knows Rebecca Black, yes? So many people have argued that this is the worst song ever. I will play you, in case you haven't heard of it before, I'll play about 10 seconds of it. That I think it's about what everybody can stand. [MUSIC - REBECCA BLACK, "FRIDAY LYRICS"] JONAH BERGER: OK. Good. So we've all heard this song before. People have argued that this is the worst song

ever, which in itself is a bit of an accomplishment. If you could truly make the worst song ever, that would be quite impressive. So one question was that if this song is so bad, why did so many people watch it? This song was one of the most viral videos of 2011, over 300 million views at this point. Why? And I was actually giving a talk to a bunch of Google executives a couple years ago, when one of your colleagues raised their hand and said hey, Professor Berger, your framework is great. But if it can't explain

Rebecca Black, it's not really worth it. If you can't explain this, come on, what are you doing? And then someone from YouTube said hold on, I think your framework can explain Rebecca Black. So they showed me this nice data. And this searches for Rebecca Black over time. What you notice is it goes up, big spike. So then it tails off, less interest. Then it goes up again, down, up again. There's a spike. You probably can't see it. But it's a spike every seven days. Every seven days is a spike in attention. Now, this song is

equally bad every day of the week. I checked. I've listened to it on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, and Friday, equally bad. Yet Friday is an environmental reminder to think about that song and to share it with others. And that's what I'll call a trigger. It's a cue, a stimulus in the environment that triggers us to think about something else. And maybe you hear that something is top-of-mind, like Friday makes us think about Rebecca Black's song, it's going to be tip-of-tongue. Not only are you going to be more likely to watch that song or

purchase a product if it is a product, but you're gong to be more likely to share it with others because it's top-of-mind. So usage is one thing that makes a product or idea top-of-mind. By top-of-mind, I basically what are you thinking about? So right now, you're probably thinking about hopefully the talk, what you just had for lunch, or what you're doing afterwards. You're probably not really thinking about what you're going to for summer vacation or what you're going to do for the holidays. Those things are lower down on your list. But using a product is

one thing that can make it top-of-mind. This is Twitter traffic for Cheerios by time of day. And not rocket science, what you see is not much around midnight, 2:00 AM, 4:00 AM. 6:00 AM, it starts going up. Around 8:00 AM, lots of people are talking about Cheerios. Then it goes down again throughout the day. And what that's saying is people eat Cheerios in the morning. It's making that product top-of-mind. It's making it more likely to talk about it and share it. Notice what happens on the weekend? It shifts a little bit to the right because

we all wake up later. So we actually analyzed both data from Cheerios, as well as Walt Disney World. That's the problem with Disney World. How many people have been to Disney this year? A couple. That's the exact problem. We don't go very often and there's nothing in the environment to remind us that the product exists. So when people come back, they talk about a lot. But they don't keep talking about it because there's no trigger to remind them of them of the product. Cheerios is really boring, extremely boring. But we eat breakfast, last time I

checked. At least once a day. Some of us, we really like cereal, maybe even twice. And if you don't eat Cheerios, you wheel your cart through the grocer isle and see that box once or twice a week. And because you're seeing it, it's more top-of-mind. And you might say well hold on, is usage is the only thing that makes a product top-of-mind? So do related cues. So if I said peanut butter and-- jelly, right? Or if I said rum and-- AUDIENCE: Coke. JONAH BERGER: Coke. Notice that the word jelly and the word Coke aren't up

there. But the word peanut butter is like a little advertisement for jelly. If someone says cat, you think of dog. If someone says peanut butter, you think of jelly. It triggers related ideas in our minds because those things are connected. Michelob used this idea of a couple years ago with their slogan, "Weekends are Made for Michelob." Their idea was hey, we're going to link the product to a time, the weekend. So when the weekend rolls around, people hopefully think about consuming the product. Every time the weekend rolls around and I want a beer, I'm going

to think about Michelob. Corona has tried to do the same thing with the beach. When you're on a beach vacation, it's really hard not to think about ordering Corona. You have to sort of stop yourself and say hold on, I should order something else. But they have done a really good job of owning the beach. Beer and the beach, you think about Corona. Weekends and the beach, hopefully you think about Michelob. So in terms of applying this concept, you need to consider the context. You think about the cues or triggers that are around your consumers

that they might come around. So one of my favorite examples of this comes with cats. So if you a the cat and your cat is hungry, what's your cat going to say? Meow, which is why Meow Mix is a great name for a cat food. Every time your cat goes meow, you're more likely to think about that thing. But you need to think about your specific customers, your consumers. So there's a restaurant in Philadelphia called Barclay Prime that has a $100 cheesesteak. A $100 cheesesteak, right? It has Kobe beef, it has lobster, it has truffles.

It comes with a little bottle of champagne. Basically, the most opulent thing you can think of. Huge, hugely expensive, I had never had it myself. Fast Company did a piece on me and the book. The writer took me out to dinner. She asked where I'd like to go. I said, let's go to Berkeley Prime and have the $100 cheesesteak on Fast Company. So she was nice enough to take me there. But if you think about it, why is $100 cheesesteak good for Philly in terms of triggers. Because Philly has a lot of cheesesteak. So every

time you think of a cheesesteak, you might think about this remarkable cheesesteak. Whereas a $100 cheesesteak is now so good for a restaurant in New York. Because you don't think about cheesesteaks very often here. And so depending on what environment you live in, what you see, what you hear, what you smell is different. Women may have certain cues that men don't have. Older people have certain cues the young people don't have. Think about the environment that people live in, it is important to think about the right triggers to link our product to. And then the

second thing is just growing your habitat. So just like animals have a habitat, a set of things in the environment they need to survive, so deer have, they need water and certain things to eat. Ideas have a habitat, a set of cues or triggers that make people think about them. And so Kit Kat did a really good job of growing their habitat. So you might say Kit Kat, I really like those. But they were having a problem a few years ago when no one would think about their product. Everyone loved it, but they'd never think

about eating it. And so they did a really simple campaign, Kit Kat and coffee. Think about having coffee, have a Kit Kat. Every time you take a coffee break, have a Kit Kat. They were linking those two things together. Why is coffee a really good trigger for Kit Kat? AUDIENCE: So people would have it often. JONAH BERGER: People have it often. You know really, really prevalent, really frequent. You have coffee multiple times a day, it's a good time to think about a Kit Kat. So the Michelob slogan was actually originally, that one Weekends are Made

for Michelob, was originally Holidays are Made for Michelob. Same issue, if you think about it, right? Holidays don't come up as frequently. It's like a Rebecca Black song was "Leap Day," leap day, leap day, something, something, leap day. Equally catchy or not catching, my karaoke voice is not good as you can tell. But much less frequently triggered by the environment. And because of that, it's not going to come up as often. There was a song around Thanksgiving that some girl had. I don't know if you saw it. She was singing into a turkey leg. Similar

sort of song, the traffic before Thanksgiving was great. Since Thanksgiving, basically nothing because there's no trigger in the environment to make them think about it. Yeah? AUDIENCE: So does something like coffee get that effect just by a virtue of being called coffee break? JONAH BERGER: You're saying why is that a good trigger to link it to? AUDIENCE: So Kit Kat had to create the campaign to link-- JONAH BERGER: To link the two together, Kit Kats and coffee. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] get that for free. JONAH BERGER: Yeah. So Rebecca Black got it for free. Rebecca Back got

it for free because she called her song "Friday." That didn't cost her any money. She just designed a song around the cue in the environment. The same thing with Barclay Prime. Barclay Prime took advantage of the environment with the $100 cheesesteak. There was already the $100 cheesesteak. Now, when people think about other cheesesteaks, they think about that one. You're right here that Kit Kat had to spend some money to link those things. And so you can either design your product to take advantage of existing triggers or you can through advertising or other methods, repeatedly link

two things together. I won't go through the rest of the framework because I know we're short on time. I'll just mention that the book talks about things like emotion. So when we care, we share. It's actually not true that all emotions increase sharing. Some emotions increase it and some actually decrease it. So if you're interested, the book talks about that. I won't show you the good Google example with-- you guys did a really nice piece with one of your ads. Public-- it's basically the idea of when we see something, we're more like to imitate it.

We can't imitate something we can't see. So I see a lot of people around here using Apple computers. Originally, the logo was the other way. It actually faced upside down when it showed to other people, because it was meant to be the North Star. When you open up your computer from your bag, you need to figure out which way the logo is facing to figure out how to take it out facing you. So they used to have if the logo is facing you, the user, it's easy to see. It's like a compass, really easy to

orient. But they actually flipped the logo, making it harder for the user to figure out which side is up, to make it easier for other people to see. Because we like to imitate others, we often imitate others, but we can't imitate them if we can't see them. So we talk a lot about making things public and different ways to do that. Practical value is just news you can use, basically useful information. And finally, stories build on this idea of a Trojan horse. Basically almost all stories are Trojan horses. They carry information, brands, benefits inside So

have you ever seen that famous Will It Blend ad, that's a great Trojan horse. People don't share that because they want to advertise Will it Blend, they share it because the content is really great. But Will It Blend comes along for the ride. It's hidden inside that broader message. People are sharing the good story, but Will It Blend comes along and gets benefit from that particular story. So I will wrap up here and I'll take questions. I won't show you Panda-- has anyone seen Panda cheese, by the way? You have-- OK. Talk to her if

you haven't seen Panda cheese or talk to me after. It's one-- you know what, I'll show you Panda cheese. There's time for Panda cheese, right? Yeah, OK. A really great example. Here's another good example of a Trojan horse, a story or message that's not a direct advertising. But it is an ad. But it does a really good job of carrying the brand for the ride. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] -Would you like some Panda cheese? No thanks, I'm not hungry. -Never Say No to Panda. I'm going to show you a couple of these because they get better. -Good

morning, good morning. I got you Panda cheese for breakfast. -No thanks, I don't feel well. -Never Say No to Panda. -Here's the best one. Dad, why don't we get some Panda cheese? Enough, that's too much already. Never Say No to Panda. -And last, but not least. Dad, why don't we get some Panda? Get one. Get one more. [END VIDEO PLAYBACK] JONAH BERGER: OK, so I always close with this ad for two reasons. One, it's really remarkable. It's really funny. And humor is one thing that drives sharing. But this ad would be equally funny if it

had a pet guy in a giraffe suite or an alligator suit or sort of a brand like Joe's Used Cars. People in suits, kicking stuff, jumping on groceries, and pulling the plug on patients in the hospital are all funny. Why this is a great example is because you can't tell the story without talking about a panda. I challenge you to tell someone else about this ad without talking about Panda, which is the brand they want you to remember. They figured out how to make it an integral detail to the story. This ad is a Trojan

horse. It's not just funny. There's a cute exterior, a candy shell. But along the way, the brand comes for the ride. And so it's not just about doing things that are crazy. It's about figuring out a way to build messages that people want to share, but your idea comes along. So just to summarize, then I'll take questions, word of mouth increases sales. But to make it work for you, you need to understand what makes things talkable or sharable, why we talk about some things rather than others. And so very briefly, we found six key steps,

six key principles that drive people to talk and share. There's social currency, that idea of status by association. We talk about things that make us look like insiders. That make us look good or smart, rather than bad or dumb. Triggers or cues in the environment. Rebecca Black, not rocket science, but viewed more on Friday because that's a trigger to make it top-of-mind and make people more likely to think about it and share it. Emotion, when we care, we share. But some emotions we share more than others. Public. Again, that idea of being publicly visible increases

imitation. Apple did a great job about making their headphones white. Now, you can look at how many people have white headphones and use that as a signal of quality for whether or not I should buy that product. Practical value, news you can use. And finally stories building a Trojan horse or a vessel that carries your information. Thank you guys, very much. I want to make sure to stay within my time, but I'm happy to take any and all questions now. Yeah? AUDIENCE: First of all, I was in your session a few years ago with [INAUDIBLE].

JONAH BERGER: Oh good, no problem. AUDIENCE: So a problem that I'm working on right now, so you say that the problem with Walt Disney is you don't experience it enough. JONAH BERGER: Yes. AUDIENCE: The problem I'm working on is actually the opposite problem. I've been trying to get people to appreciate how awesome the internet is. Which it seems like it's simple, but like we live in it so much that we only think about the internet like when it's broken or when it's not really working. So given the framework that you're building, like how do you

get us aware of-- like how you do an ad campaign for oxygen or these sorts of things that are so-- JONAH BERGER: A commodity. Or like you only think about the water at your house when it goes off or the power when it goes off. But I think you just pointed out a really great point about your message. What if you could communicate people what it would be like if the internet went off? So not actually have them experience that and have them be upset when it's slow, but have them mentally simulate what that would

be like. So you could imagine showing a campaign which shows what it would be like if the internet was down. So using analogies is a really helpful way to get people to understand something. So try to get them to experience what that would be like, even without having them experience themselves. Bing is obviously trying to steal some space from you guys. But they tried to do that recently with their experience the speed difference between Bing and Google, allow people to not only say well, OK, Bing could say hey, we have a great product. But you

guys would say oh, I don't know if it's really great. Whereas if they can show you, you'd actually experience it. So how could you make people experience what life would be like when the internet was down, either rhetorically or actually experience it in some way? And encourage them to use that. I mean imagine if you had an ad that just reminded people what it was like during dial-up time. Remember how frustrating that is? Or imagine if you've been to a conference and you're waiting for the internet to load. And it takes forever. It's really slow.

Or how it used to be when you couldn't find anything. And showing people that again might encourage them to remember how useful the internet is. Yeah? AUDIENCE: I'm curious about your study on "The New York Times" [INAUDIBLE] shared. So given that there's some use triggers where they're not-- I don't think social like cachet would necessarily apply to a lot of the article. What were some of the triggers that apply to "The New York Times"? JONAH BERGER: So we found a number of different things. And if you're interested, the article is up on my website and

we talk about it in the book. We found a few things. So one, there is some social currency in sharing. People are more likely to share interesting or surprising things because it makes them look good. There's also a lot of practical value, so restaurant reviews, movie reviews. If you ever see the articles that come out in education aren't many. But tips for choosing colleges, people love that. One big thing in practical value is six tips for this. I call it the "Cosmo" effect. If you ever looked at "Cosmo" when you're in the line at the

grocery store, and most men's magazines do it as well, but six secrets for this, seven ways to do this. Articles that really boil down concepts into useful information get shared a lot. But then we also found emotion was a big driver. And not just positive emotion, also negative emotions if they're high arousal. So if you think about both positive and negative emotions, they can be divided not only into whether their valence is positive or negative. So happiness or humor is a positive emotion. Anger or sadness is a negative emotion. But also whether they're high or

low arousal. So anger and sadness are both negative emotions. Neither fear is really good, but anger is activating emotion and sadness is a deactivating emotion. So you think about what you do. When you're angry, you want to yell at someone. You want to throw something. You're mad, you're shaking your fists. When you're sad, what do you do? You of curl up under the covers, you put on your favorite sweat shirt, eat a big bowl of ice cream. You sort of shut off from the world. And so what we found is it's not only whether the

articles are positive or negative, but also at the high arousal, activating, or low arousal, deactivating. We actually found anything that deactivates actually decreases sharing. So even merely the act of running in place, so we've done experiments where we have people run in place in the laboratory, that increases the likelihood of emailing articles to others, even if those articles have nothing to do with the running in place. Because it activates the body. That physiological system gets going and they infer that then the content must be worth sharing. So that's just some of the things we found

from the Times analysis. Other-- yeah? AUDIENCE: So you mentioned earlier that there's a misconception about how much the word of mouth is taking place over social media right now and I totally think that's true. And you mentioned sort of the other side of that being a person's interpersonal interactions. JONAH BERGER: Yes. AUDIENCE: Like I've been reading more and more about people talking about like this idea of dark social, which is a ridiculous term. But basically it's-- JONAH BERGER: It's a great term though, right? Yeah. Everyone is like what is dark social? AUDIENCE: On the social

media track-- email, and the chat, and all that-- so in your research, like how much do you think that that factors in or doesn't in how we share things? Like how important is that? Are we skewed because we can track the social media stuff that Twitter basically is? JONAH BERGER: Yeah. So I think that's one we reason that we focus so much on the online. We say OK, we can see it. And I'm actually working on an op-ed for "The New York Times" for this weekend. But think about just how statistics or measuring things affect

our behavior. So take Facebook, for example. Facebook made the number of friends we have a thing to count. Well, now we all want that number to be higher. You think about the Prius, the Prius came out. We used to care about how fast a car went. Now, they display the gas mileage. The gas mileage has always been there. But now that we can see it, we care a lot about it. Because we can say oh, I want to get my gas mileage higher. I want to get my Twitter followers higher because more must be better.

And so merely measuring things can actually change our behavior in relation to those things. And I think social is the same way. We can see it online. And I'm all about measurement. I'm a data guy. I like measuring things. I'm not saying we shouldn't measure things. But we should be careful how merely measuring things can change our behavior. And just because we're measuring something, doesn't mean we're measuring the right thing. So we've done some work with offline word of mouth, as well. So there's a company called Keller Fay that records lots of-- asks people to

keep diaries of offline conversations. Some smart academics have put together a device called the EAR, electronically activated recorder. Basically you can carry it around with you. It records ambient noise throughout the day. So it can get a chance of what you're talking about throughout the day, even if you're not writing it online. And so I think there are ways to measure offline behavior. But there's always a focus on what's online. I think the important thing here is we've done some of the leg work. So some companies say well hold on, we want to test every

single campaign. How can we test offline sharing? How can we measure it? And what we can say is well, look, we've actually looked at offline sharing. We've done a lot of research in this space. If you follow these principles, your stuff will be shared more. You don't necessarily have to do the groundwork all over again. But I agree, certain things are definitely harder to measure in this space. Anybody else? Yeah? AUDIENCE: Cats? JONAH BERGER: Oh, why cats? So I'm an academic. Academics tend to be a little bit of curmudgeons, so oh, cats. So I used

to say, oh, it's not actually true. And I thought about it a little more. I was going to write an op-ed about cats versus dogs. And I have an answer that's less satisfying to me, but I think is more true. So one, I think there are more cat people. Cat owners I think are more into their cats than dog owners are. Everyone's into their pets. It's like your kids. Why do you show photos of your kids? Look at my kid. They did this. They made this great picture. You show it to all your friends. And

they're like what is that? It's like macaroni on like a piece of cardboard. But yeah, because my kid, my kid made this. It's great. So the same thing with cats and dogs in general. I think cat people are maybe a little bit more engaged with their-- dog people are a more like this is my dog. But cat people are like this is my cat. I'm so excited. Having spent though unfortunately, fortunately or unfortunately, an hour looking at cat photos and videos last week and thinking about whether I could write this editorial, I think that cats

are actually not more photogenic, but they have more of a varieties of faces and things that make them amenable to the phrases that people put on those pictures. So they really make themselves amenable to whatever we want to call them, the I Can Has Cheezburger? Or you know, I mean your fridge, eating your foods. There's things we put on them. If you look at those for dogs, they're just not like "as good." So I wouldn't think that per cat piece, cats are more likely to be shared that a given dog piece. But I think that

more cat pieces are created just because they're sort of more leeway to do those things. Whether it's a cat hanging on its hind legs looking like it's from "Thriller" or a cat that is like Hoover Cat, there's all sorts of these different things. I think dogs generally look happy. And I have a dog myself. I'm a dog person. So I'm very dismayed that people share lots of cat things. But dogs sort of have the happy look and the sort of dumb, out of it look. My dog has both of them. Whereas cats do more angry.

They do different sorts of things. And I think that's really amenable to those phrases, which itself is a little bit of internet culture. I think that's a great example of social currency. Why do people do that? What do they riff off existing photos? There's a recent one you might have seen with a pigeon with bread around, a bread crust around it's neck. Have you seen that one, where it says swag underneath, which I think is just great. But it's sort of showing that you know what's going on in culture. You can riff off it and

create something new. And so I think that's a driver of a lot of those. Why cats I think, I think cats are quite photogenic. AUDIENCE: Well, you listed the question about why there's more cat media up there than say dog media-- JONAH BERGER: Yes. AUDIENCE: --but not why it's shared more. JONAH BERGER: So I'm not actually-- so sorry. To be clear, shared more in aggregate is different than likelihood of sharing. So there's 1,000 pieces of cat stuff and there's 100 pieces of dog stuff, cat stuff may have more aggregate shares, even though the likelihood of

sharing given seeing one of those is lower. So you'd have to be 10 times as likely share the dog stuff for aggregate shares-- if there's 1/10 the dog stuff, you gotta be 10 times likely to share it. I'm not convinced that you are more likely to share a piece of cat content. But I think people are more likely to create cat content. And so the overall aggregate sharing of cat content is higher, even though the likelihood-- if you sent me a piece of cat content and you sent me a piece of dog content, the likelihood

of sharing it might be equal. But I have not empirically looked at that, even though it is a fun thing to empirically look at. AUDIENCE: So this is now your next piece of research. JONAH BERGER: Ah, yes. I should rigorously examine cat versus dog, cat versus dog things. AUDIENCE: Well, if you do, that certainly will be best seller. JONAH BERGER: Yes. It's emotion in one of those things. We care about our cats. We like to show our cats doing funny things. And we like to show we're in the loop, which I think both relates to

social currency and emotion. Anything else? OK, thank you guys for coming. I will stay up here, if there are any more questions. Otherwise, have a good day.