A Review of "Contagious: Why Things Catch On" and its Application for Sortition
As a proponent of democratic lotteries I am quite interested in how to promote and market ideas, which is why I read Jonah Berger’s Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Berger is a professor of marketing from the University of Pennsylvania. Below is a summary of the main points of his book. I’ll then go into some possible advertising with sortition and with an organization promoting sortition called Democracy Without Elections or DWE (which is nonprofit, member run, and maybe you should join!).
Introduction
Berger first goes into the phenomenon of the $100 Cheese steak. This menu item was designed for a new, upscale Philadelphia steakhouse. The $100 Cheese steak was put on the menu as a gimmick for people to talk about his restaurant. His scheme proved successful. “[Restaurateur Howard] Wein didn’t create just another cheese steak, he created a conversation piece.”
Why Do Products, Ideas, and Behaviors Catch On?
Berger lists a couple epidemic phenomena: Six sigma management strategy. Nonfat Greek yogurt. Atkins, Southbeach, low-carb craze. Smoking bans. Berger calls these “social epidemics. Instances where products, ideas, and behaviors diffuse through a population.” Berger then asks why some social phenomenon catch on while others do not. To Berger, the most important factor is word of mouth. “Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 percent to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.”
“Word of mouth is more effective than traditional advertising for two key reasons. First, it’s more persuasive.” Ads are not credible. However, friends tend to tell it to us straight. Word of mouth is also more targeted, “naturally directed toward an interested audience.”
Finally, Berger claims that most “word of mouth” transmission happens offline, not online. Only 7% of word-of-mouth advertising happens online. The rest is going to happen at a party or at the water cooler.
Example: Blendtec Blender
Berger highlights the Blendtec blender, where founder Tom Mormon would cram a bunch of marbles, golf balls, etc and blend it. People were amazed at loved these videos and ultimately increased blender sales by 700%.
The Six Principles of Contagiousness.
Now we get to Berger’s theory. What content is contagious and likely to spread?
Principle #1: Social Currency
Berger writes,
Most people would rather look smart than dumb, rich than poor, and cool than geeky… knowing about cool things make people seem sharp and in the know. So to get people talking we need to craft messages that help them achieve these desired impressions…. we need to leverage game mechanics to give people ways to achieve and provide visible symbols of status that they can show to others.
Berger’s first example of social currency is a “secret” nightclub called “Please Don’t Tell.” The marketing principle of that club was that people like to tell secrets and therefore spread the existence of the club through word-of-mouth.
To summarize some strategies:
Create factoids that make the speaker seem clever.
Leverage game mechanics (think frequent flyer miles, metrics to measure “score” and status)
Make people feel like insiders. Create artificial scarcity and exclusivity. (ie Disney Vault, McRib).
Create motivation. (ie Fantasy Football. People start watching football games and using the NFL site just to play the fantasy football game). “As soon as you pay people for doing something, you crowd out their intrinsic motivation”.
Principle #2: Triggers
Berger states that people need triggers to remind them to talk about products and ideas.
Triggers are stimuli that prompt people to think about related things…. we need to design products and ideas that are frequently triggered by the environment and create new triggers by linking our products and ideas to prevalent cues in that environment.
For example, a $100 Philly cheese steak was a good product in Philadelphia due to the prevalence of cheese steak, which would remind residents of “Cheese steak” and then to “$100 Cheese steak”. That’s why a steakhouse would offer a cheese steak.
It’s not enough for a product to be interesting. There needs a trigger to initialize conversation about the product.
Berger also distinguishes between immediate vs ongoing word of mouth:
Immediate word of mouth - You share the details of an experience soon/immediately after acquiring it.
Ongoing word of mouth - Covers the conversations we have in the weeks and months that follow - the movie you saw last month, or the vacation you took last year.
Though both are important, Berger sees ongoing word-of-mouth as more valuable. Interesting products do not sustain high levels of word-of-mouth. More boring products do.
Principle #3: Emotion
When we care, we share. So wow can we craft messages and ideas that make people feel something? Naturally contagious content usually evokes some sort of emotion. Blending an iPhone is surprising. A potential tax hike is infuriating. Emotional things often get shared… but some emotions increase sharing, while others actually decrease it. So we need to pick the right emotions to evoke.
So what kind of stuff, such as articles, get shared the most?
According to Berger for the New York Times, educational articles are more likely to make the Most Emailed List. Health pieces went more viral than political ones. Finally, science articles were oftentimes shared. Yes, practical value and social currency play into these shares.
But based on Berger’s analysis, the most important emotion that led people to share, for science articles, was Awe. “The sense of wonder and amazement that occurs when someone is inspired by great knowledge, beauty, sublimity, or might”. “Awe-inspiring articles were 30% more likely to make the Most E-Mailed list.” Anger and anxiety are also more likely to result in more emails.
So what reduces sharing? Sadness has the opposite effect - Sad articles were 16% less likely to be most emailed. In my opinion these percentages are pretty low that for our purposes ought to be negligible. Contentment also reduces sharing.
In other words, the emotion that ought to be triggered is physiological arousal. So rouse people up!
Principle #4: Public
“Monkey see, monkey do”. Make things more observable. “Design products and initiatives that advertise themselves and create behavioral residue that sticks around even after people have bought the product or espoused the idea.”
Berger dives into an example on how to turn the private public: Mustache November, created to bring awareness to Prostrate Cancer. Grow a mustache, people ask about the very public mustache, and that gives you an excuse to proselytize about the cause. “Livestrong” yellow wristbands also invoke a similar response.
Another interesting campaign - every email sent from a Hotmail account contained a message at the bottom - “Get your private, free e-mail from Hotmail at www.hotmail.com”.
Principle #5: Practical Value
Craft content that seems to be useful. “People like to help others, so if we can show them how our products or ideas will save time, improve health, or save money, they’ll spread the word”.
Berger than goes into the “psychology of deals” and Daniel Kahneman’s “prospect theory” and the early study of behavioral economics. Some main tenets:
People don’t evaluate things in absolute terms but to a relative comparison standard or “reference point”. (For example, older people are stingier because they remember the cheaper prices of when they were younger)
“Diminished sensitivity” - A change in price has a smaller impact the farther it is from the reference point. For example, we care about a $10 savings for a $20 clock, but we don’t care about a $10 savings for a $5000 car.
Berger highlights these so that stores can pretend to save you money, for example a 70% sale off everything!
Berger also mentions the use of informative articles that companies might publish (for example Vanguard emails about financial management).
Principle #6: Stories
“People don’t just share information, they tell stories”. Berger suggests that we need to create interesting stories to tell, so that story-tellers would want to tell it.
Berger goes on to talk about “Trojan Horse” - a “carrier narrative that people will share, while talking about [a] product or idea along the way.” For example the Subway Jared story, where Jared Fogle can lose weight by walking to Subway and eating their sandwiches. For example Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign that criticized unrealistic beauty norms… to make you buy Dove beauty products.
Applying the Principles to Sortition and Democracy without Elections
The rest of Berger’s book elaborates on his six principles with more detailed examples and implementation. For my purposes, I’m interested in using Berger’s principles for sortition advocacy. So how can we apply the principles to sortition?
Social Currency
We can tell “fun facts” about sortition. For example
How Ancient Athens was actually run through sortition rather than just direct democracy
About interesting political decisions that random people (in the form of Citizen Assemblies) have come to.
Sortition also has the advantage here of being an unknown and “underground” kind of social movement.
Triggers
Some triggers we might take advantage of:
Elections. Elections occur all the time and we need to associate elections with sortition. So every time someone brings up an election, someone might say, “Well the Ancient Greeks thought elections were oligarchic while believed democracy was a system where magistrates were chosen by lot!” The organization Democracy Without Elections has an advantage in its name in this space.
Talking about politicians. Every once in a while social norms break down and a friend or family member might talk about politics. The horror! Talk of politics oftentimes revolves around politicians such as AOC, the Clintons, Trump, etc. Perhaps an appropriate DWE marketing strategy needs to construct associations with these names.
Public
I think DWE members could all adopt DWE signatures at the bottom of their emails and social media pages to help advertise the organization. I think a DWE T-shirt could also be pretty effective, it might trigger a lot of people to ask, “What the heck is democracy without elections?” Perhaps we could also steal a playbook from Livestrong and design a DWE bracelet, which has the advantage that it can be worn for more kinds of outfits and settings.
Practical Value
DWE and sortition probably has a lower value proposition than consumer products. As discussed by Berger, the practical values DWE could bring is the continued publication of informative content for public consumption, including this article!
However there can also be some practical value created by advocating for the use of small scale sortition for office meetings, community organizations, and student clubs. For example instead of forcing so many people to attend a meeting, sortition could be used to reduce the number of participants. What scenarios would this be applicable to?
Stories
Sortition already has a great story to tell so not much work is needed here. However the convincing people to join organization such as DWE is a harder story to tell.
Reiteration of the Principles
As they all say, repetition is a key to learning… Berger summarizes his key principles as:
“Social Currency — We share things that make us look good”.
“Triggers — Top of mind, tip of tongue”.
“Emotion — When we care, we share”.
“Public — Built to show, built to grow”.
“Practical Value — News you can use”.
“Stories — Information travels under the guide of idle chatter”.
My personal takeaway from this article and the book? I got a hankering for cheese-steak by writing this review.