Contagious

Wharton Marketing Professor Jonah Berger has spent decades researching what makes ideas spread and marketing go viral. The best idea and brand story with the right archetype won’t make a difference if it isn’t seen. With today’s fragmented media landscape, you need to know what makes something catch on and drives word-of-mouth to spread your story.

This book outlines 6 characteristics of what makes things catch on with social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value, and story. Understanding these factors helped improve my brand stories. Even social media advertising only buys an interruption. It doesn’t guarantee action and spread.

Where my scholarly diet provided perspective to help me see the world differently, Contagious provided a means to apply this perspective to the ideas I put in the world.

Jonah Berger’s academic work explores the science of why we share what we share and how ideas catch on.

His book, however, takes a step forward and provides a framework that can be leveraged to help engineer ideas in such a way that practitioners might increase the likelihood of their ideas spreading.

This book helped me communicate what previously felt like intuition and empowered me to do so with a level… show more.

Creative ideas are nothing without distribution. Social recognition plays an essential role in the creative process, but ideas can’t get recognized without people being exposed to them. Berger’s book provides a manual and framework for how to get your ideas seen, heard, or experienced. He also (successfully) leans on his professorial background to use research to help explain why these tactics work.