Book Review: Contagious: Why things catch on

Berger, J. (2013). Contagious: Why things catch on. Simon & Schuster.

Imagine a $100 cheesesteak sandwich or a secret restaurant in New York hidden through a phone booth in the back of a hot dog restaurant, the awareness of both was spread through word of mouth. The author (Berger, 2013) states that 20-50% of all purchases are made because of word of mouth (p. 7). This statistic doesn’t lie, word of mouth is powerful. This book is for those that want their content (online or offline) to catch on or are curious about how that happens. The focus is on the “why” and the “how” of expansive content.

Six principles or STEPPS that affect the spread of content are examined: Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, Stories.  Berger includes a good amount of anecdotes to bring to life his theories. The first principle that he addresses is Social Currency. Having something juicy to share with another person creates a sense of urgency to pass on the knowledge. One reason the urgency is palpable is knowing something that the other person does not. It increases your social currency. 

Another principle, Emotion, is anchored in the examination of the most emailed articles. Question: which do you think are the most emailed articles from NYTimes.com? Berger, as a Stanford grad student, and his team, analyzed 6 months’ worth of articles published by the NY Times. What they discovered was that content that was “high arousal”, where arousal means, “…a state of activation and readiness for action”(2013), and displaying positive emotion was most likely to be shared. This graph displays the array of emotions and how they fall into the categories that he studied.  

(Berger, p.109)

The author’s final principle, Stories, is described with what he does best, tales. The powerful story of Dove beauty care company and their campaign to expose the alterations that are taken when a model has their photo taken and then run through Photoshop illustrates the principle of Stories. The campaign created a short film that detailed the transformation of a model from plain-faced and simple to the extremes of a supermodel and unattainable beauty standards that only occur on the computer. The final line of the short film by Tim Piper, “Evolution”( http://www.johahberger.com ), is “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.” Berger examines how important it is to stay close to the product that you are selling and to keep the message “…integral to the story. When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it”(p.190). This is the “how” that he mentioned at the beginning of the book. 

My information community is healthy eaters and the author mentioned several times the information-seeking behavior of the health community. He gave an example of a disgusting, yet effective, anti-soda campaign where a person drank “fat” out of a can of soda and the message was, “Drink one can of soda a day can make you 10 pounds fatter a year. Don’t drink yourself fat.”(Berger, 2013). That is powerful and repugnant, but it catches one’s attention. This sort of message can be shown as a campaign on tv or online and will then spread via word of mouth. I am particularly drawn to the information encountering method as Erdelez says in her article, “information encountering is a memorable experience of an unexpected discovery of useful or interesting information”(1999). Imagine reading a health article online and “encountering” this ad in the byline.

Erdelez (1999) describes several ways that people stumble upon the information. First, there are “‘non-encounterers’ people for whom it is difficult to recall any information encountering experience” and then  “‘occasional encounterers’ -people who occasionally encounter information but do not see in these events more than a lucky incident.  And finally the “‘super encounterers’ – They encounter information regularly and perceive it as an important element of their information acquisition.” (p. 26). This brings to mind people who are interested in healthy eating and have social support for health information. Because of the awareness of health information from their social network, they then seek out health information online (McKinley, 2014). In terms of Erdelez’s theory, they most likely fall more into the super-encounterer because if they are seeking out health information online, they have already been exposed to it offline in their social circles and then take this information online. They encounter the information both offline and online. They don’t limit themselves to one arena only and see this information as integral to who they are as healthy eaters. 

And Contagious creates a clear roadmap of how to lead content into the viral realm. The Ecological Model of ELIS (everyday life information seeking) (Savolainen, 2017) describes how people are within levels of information in terms of proximity: family and friends, then “clubs, churches, and voluntary organizations” then media and onto institutions. Berger addressed different levels through his principles and honored the creative just as Williamson (Savolainen, 2017) does with their model where “The individual is seen as a creative and thinking entity…” (p.1510). Berger shared principles that a creative person would identify with. His holistic view in this book places the reader deeply into a world of creative thinking and possibilities.

References

Berger, J. (2013). Contagious: Why things catch on. Simon & Schuster.

Erdelez, S. (1999). Information encountering: It’s more than just bumping into information. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 25(3), 26–29. https://doi.org/10.1002/bult.118

McKinley, C., Wright, P. (2014). Informational social support and online health information seeking: Examining the association between factors contributing to healthy eating behavior. Computers in Human Behavior, 37,107-116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.04.023

Savolainen, R. (2017).  Everyday life information seeking. In McDonald, J.D., & Levine-Clark, M. (Eds.). Everyday life information seeking. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (pp.1506-1515). CRC Press. https://doi-org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.1081/E-ELIS4