Jonah Berger

Contagious

Why Things Catch On

Contagious Summary

15 minute read    Audio Available

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Synopsis

Contagious combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheese-steak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the seemingly most boring products there is a blender.

Who is this book for?

  • Readers who are interested in persuasive and leadership oriented books.
  • People who need to use persuasion to generate sales or inspire change.
  • Anyone interested to learn how to use why to get desired results.

Meet the author

Jonah Berger is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is an expert on word of mouth, viral marketing, social influence, and how products, ideas, and behaviors catch on.


Contagious Summary

Sometimes small is better than big. Be aware of your market and always make sure that you choose the correct strategy for your particular product.

As a business person whether investing on or marketing a product or an idea, having the right strategy will help you grow. Planning allows you to focus on the future and view various alternative ways in which you can improve your business and even popularize it.

Through his book, Jonah Berger shares how you can follow up on various factors that influence how contagious a product becomes. Not only is following his advice helpful, but it also enables you to learn how to carry out strategies that impact the business and marketing world.

One thing we can all learn from this book is that it can take time for some things to catch on, while others gain popularity within an instance. Your dreams may be big but getting to the finish line requires effort, time, and commitment.

Starting small and simple can help as you get to learn how to maneuver through the business world and eventually, you find yourself at your destination of interest. This books then becomes a helpful partner to which you can refer for advice whenever you require it.

Making the right plans will also help you to be aware of what you hope to achieve. Many people will venture or engage in something just because it is trending and by doing so, feel like their social status is boosted.

Whether knowingly or unknowingly, people will often make things accessible. Planning on taking advantage of such a feature would help you a lot in saving on time and money and even influence your growth as a business person.

Contagious seeks to answer many questions many people have – including yourself over why things catch on and getting a deep understanding of what Jonah Berger seeks to explain helps you to expand your mindset and enable you to carry out proper planning.

Get people talking. Word of mouth is your best advertising tool and it costs almost nothing. Making use of it can save you a lot of time and money.

In his book, Berger shares some principles that affect the frequency of seeing a product. In this case, we may not realize it, but most times, we end up advertising a product by word of mouth, sharing it with friends or family, or even on the internet. It promotes the frequency of seeing the outcome.

As a business-oriented person, this is a technique you ought to familiarize with and come up with the best ways to enhance how frequent your potential clients see your product. Jonah Berger provides advice intertwined with stories through his book to enable you to gain insight into specific strategies you can develop for a successful career in your entrepreneurship.

Pricing also influences the frequency of how your product will spread among your potential clients. It is almost evident that many people are attracted to favorable prices and when the effect of advertising it added, your product becomes contagious. Thus, Berger provides an insight into helping you strategize for maximum market reach as a business person. However, for this to be fully effective, the product needs to be a good quality product. He even goes ahead to explain why these factors are key players in making a product very well known.

So, taking the time to read through “Contagious” enables you to be business and market savvy. In any case, people gravitate towards a product that has excellent reviews or recommendations from peers, costs less and generally used in its use.

Coupling these methods to work efficiently for your product is among ways to help the product grow and increase its frequency rate of market popularity. Berger also describes the six basic principles and how a product becomes contagious.

All of these narrow down to how a product or idea can have a high or low frequency in how other people see it.

Be as interesting as possible. People love talking about things that entertain them or make them seem more interesting to other people.

What comes to mind when you think about the topic of “Triggers”? Jonah Berger uses this as a fundamental principle in which he emphasizes various stories and concepts.

The main point in the triggering principle majorly relates to how an idea or concept stimulates an action. As a marketer or business person, you will have specific goals that you seek to accomplish.

The triggering effect comes in handy when you focus these goals to produce the desired results. You can liken this effect to your favorite meal.

Each time you think about it, it probably has a specific impact on you.

Thus, Jonah Berger talks about triggers as a way of helping you to seek the right motivation for your marketing endeavors. In the book, he points out how various marketers were able to utilize this fundamental principle to push up the sales of their products.

People will often respond to certain things whether they like it or not. Take for example a bell ringing in a school, and it triggers a specific reaction since it is an indicator of time.

Triggers are also affected by word of mouth. As most people do not realize this, they will often talk about a product, idea or even a brand be it positive or negative.

It triggers a particular reaction in the person gaining this information.

Taking Berger’s advice over looking for various ways to link up different triggers to build up your product sales is among the better ways to carry out proper marketing skills.

As a marketer, you need to figure out the best ways to trigger positive reactions towards your products. In this case, making your products to have more creativity, become exciting and are of high quality will trigger many people to talk and share about these products.

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“People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.” 

Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why Things Catch On

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