Contagious: Why Things Catch On (27 page)

Something “out of the ordinary”:
For a discussion of the story behind Snapple facts, see
http://mittelmitte.blogspot.com/2006/09/snapple-real-facts-are-100-true.html
and
http://mysnapplerealfacts.blogspot.com/
.

Wharton professor Raghu Iyengar:
Berger, Jonah, and Raghuram Iyengar (2013), “How Interest Shapes Word-of-Mouth over Different Channels,” Wharton working paper.

More interesting tweets:
Bakshy, Eytan, Jake M. Hofman, Winter A. Mason, and Duncan J. Watts (2011), “Everyone’s an Influencer:
Quantifying Influence on Twitter,”
WSDM
, 65–74. See also Berger, Jonah, and Katherine Milkman (2012), “What Makes Online Content Viral,”
Journal of Marketing Research
49, no. 2, 192–205.

psychologists from the University of Illinois:
Burrus, Jeremy, Justin Kruger, and Amber Jurgens (2006), “The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story: The Distortion of Stories in the Service of Entertainment,” University of Illinois working paper.

One way to generate surprise:
Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath (2011),
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
(New York: Random House).

Mysteries and controversy:
Ibid. See also Chen, Zoey, and Jonah Berger (2012), “When, Why, and How Controversy Causes Conversation,” Wharton working paper.

Shot on a handheld camera:
Details about
The Blair Witch Project
can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project
.

black toilet paper:
Information about Renova, the Portuguese company that makes colored toilet paper, can be found at
http://www.renovaonline.net/_global/
.

180 million people:
The facts about frequent flier programs came from
http://www.frequentflyerservices.com/press_room/facts_and_stats/frequent_flyer_facts.php
and
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/11/prweb8925371.htm
.

discrete markers motivate us:
Information about how goals can act as reference points and how discrete progress markers can affect motivation can be found in: Heath, Chip, Richard P. Larrick, and George Wu (1999), “Goals as Reference Points,”
Cognitive Psychology
38, 79–109; Amir, On, and Dan Ariely (2008), “Resting on Laurels: The Effects of Discrete Progress Markers as Sub-goals on Task Performance and Preferences,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
34, no. 5, 1158–71; and Kivetz, Ran, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng (2006), “The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected: Purchase Acceleration, Illusionary Goal Progress, and Customer Retention,”
Journal of Marketing Research
43, no. 1, 39–56.

By increasing motivation, the cards:
Kivetz, Ran, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng (2006), “The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected: Purchase Acceleration, Illusionary Goal Progress, and Customer Retention,”
Journal of Marketing Research
, 43 (February), 39–58.

They preferred to do better:
Solnick, S. J., and D. Hemenway (1998), “Is More Always Better? A Survey on Positional Concerns.”
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
37, 373–83.

the contest helped drive sales:
Information about Burberry’s “Art of the Trench” campaign can be found at
http://blogs.wsj.com/source/2010/01/19/burberry%E2%80%99s-trench-website-too-good-to-be-true/
and
http://www.1to1media.com/weblog/2010/01/internet_marketing_from_the_tr.html
.

“It’s like the concierge”:
Interview with Ben Fischman on June 12, 2012. Thanks to Dave Balter for introducing me to this great story.

If something is difficult to obtain:
For a discussion of how effort influences inferences of value, see Aronson, Elliot (1997), “The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: The Evolution and Vicissitudes of an Idea,” in
The Message of Social Psychology: Perspectives on Mind in Society
, ed. Craig McGarty and S. Alexander Haslam (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing), 20–35; and Aronson, Elliot, and Judson Mills (1959), “The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group,”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
66, no. 6, 584–88. See also Sela, Aner, and Jonah Berger (2011), “Decision Quicksand: How Trivial Choices Suck Us In,”
Journal of Consumer Research
, 39.

People evaluate cookbooks:
There are a number of valuable papers on how scarcity affects value. See Verhallen, Theo (1982), “Scarcity and Consumer Choice Behavior,”
Journal of Economic Psychology
2, 299–322; Worchel, S., J. Lee, and A. Adewole (1975), “Effects of Supply and Demand on Ratings of Object Value,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
32, 906–14; Fromkin, H. L., J. C. Olson, R. L. Dipboye, and D. Barnaby (1971), “A Commodity Theory Analysis of Consumer Preferences for Scarce Products,”
Proceedings 79th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association
, 1971, pp. 653–54.

Chicken McNuggets:
Thanks to Dave Balter for telling me about the McRib locator. For background details on the story, see
http://www.maxim.com/funny/the-cult-of-the-mcrib-0
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McRib
.

as soon as you pay people:
For early (and extremely clever) research on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, see Lepper, Mark R., David Greene, and Richard E. Nisbett (1973), “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward: A Test of the ‘Overjustification’ Hypothesis,”
Journal of Social and Personality Psychology
28, no. 1, 129–37. For a more recent treatment, see Heyman, James, and Dan Ariely (2004), “Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets,”
Psychological Science
15, no. 11, 787–93.

2.
Triggers

“Nobody talks about boring companies”:
Sernovitz, Andy (2006),
Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking
(Chicago: Kaplan Publishing).

People talk about Cheerios:
The finding that Honey Nut Cheerios get more word of mouth than Walt Disney World comes from the BzzAgent analysis we discuss in this chapter: Berger, Jonah, and Eric Schwartz (2011), “What Drives Immediate and Ongoing Word-of-Mouth?”
Journal of Marketing
, October, 869–80. The finding also comes from Twitter data on the frequency with which these two brands are discussed.

sixteen word-of-mouth episodes:
Carl, Walter (2006), “What’s All the Buzz About? Everyday Communication and the Relational Basis of Word-of-Mouth and Buzz Marketing Practices,”
Management Communication Quarterly
19, 601–34.

American consumers mention specific brands:
Keller, Ed, and Barak Libai (2009), “A Holistic Approach to the Measurement of WOM,” presentation at ESOMAR Worldwide Media Measurement Conference, Stockholm (May 4–6).

Dave gave my colleague Eric Schwartz:
This included information about the product in each campaign and the number of BzzReports each BzzAgent submitted. We were especially interested in the fact that we could analyze the buzz generated by each product by agent. After all, certain people might share more word of mouth than others: Chatty Cathys talk more than Quiet Quentins. But by looking at how much individual agents talked across different campaigns, we could identify patterns. We could see whether an agent talked more about a coffee brand than a new type of digital camera. And we could start to understand why certain products got more word of mouth than others. Not just whether people talked about certain product categories (such as food) more than others (such as movies), but what really drives discussion in the first place—the psychology of talk.

some thoughts are more top of mind:
Accessibility is a huge topic in psychology; for some classic research on the topic, see Higgins, E. Tory, and G. King (1981), “Accessibility of Social Constructs: Information-processing Consequences of Individual and Contextual Variability,” in
Personality, Cognition, and Social Interaction
, ed. N. Cantor and J. F. Kihlstrom (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum),
60–81; and Wyer, Robert S., and T. K. Srull (1981), “Category Accessibility: Some Theoretical and Empirical Issues Concerning the Processing of Social Stimulus Information,” in
Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium
, vol. 1, ed. E. T. Higgins, C. P. Herman, and M. P. Zanna (Hillsdale, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum), 161–97.

Some things are chronically accessible:
For an early paper on chronic accessibility, see Bargh, John A., W. J. Lombardi, and E. Tory Higgins (1988), “Automaticity of Chronically Accessible Constructs in Person X Situation Effects on Person Perception: It’s Just a Matter of Time,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
55, no. 4, 599–605.

stimuli in the surrounding environment:
There is a huge literature on stimuli in the environment and spreading activation, but for some classics, see Anderson, John R. (1983),
The Architecture of Cognition
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press); Collins, Allan M., and Elizabeth F. Loftus (1975), “A Spreading-Activation Theory of Semantic Processing,”
Psychological Review
82, no. 6, 407–28; and Higgins, Tory E., William S. Rholes, and Carl R. Jones (1977), “Category Accessibility and Impression Formation,”
Journal of Social Psychology
13 (March), 141–54. For examples in a consumption context, see Nedungadi, P. (1990), “Recall and Consumer Consideration Sets: Influencing Choice Without Altering Brand Evaluations,”
Journal of Consumer Research
17, no. 3, 263–76; and Berger, Jonah, and Gráinne M. Fitzsimons (2008), “Dogs on the Street, Pumas on Your Feet: How Cues in the Environment Influence Product Evaluation and Choice,”
Journal of Marketing Research
45, no. 1, 1–14.

the candy company Mars:
White, Michael (1997), “Toy Rover Sales Soar into Orbit: Mars Landing Puts Gold Shine Back into Space Items,”
Arizona Republic
, July 12A, E1.

Music researchers Adrian North:
North, Adrian C., David J. Hargreaves, and Jennifer McKendrick (1997), “In-Store Music Affects Product Choice,”
Nature
390 (November), 132.

Psychologist Gráinne Fitzsimons:
Berger and Fitzsimons, “Dogs on the Street,” 1–14.

people possess core beliefs:
Riker, William, and Peter Ordeshook (1968), “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting,”
American Political Science Review
62, no. 1, 25–42.

Arizona’s 2000 general election:
Berger, Jonah, Marc Meredith, and S. Christian Wheeler (2008), “Contextual Priming: Where People Vote Affects How They Vote,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
105, no. 26, 8846–49.

Rebecca’s parents paid four thousand dollars:
Details about Rebecca Black came from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Black
.

Triggers boost word of mouth:
Also see Rosen, Emanuel (2003),
Anatomy of Buzz
(London: Profile Books), for a nice related discussion of triggers.

More frequently triggered products:
Berger, Jonah, and Eric Schwartz (2011), “What Drives Immediate and Ongoing Word-of-Mouth?”
Journal of Marketing
, October, 869–80.

analyzed hundreds of
New York Times
book reviews:
Berger, Jonah, Alan T. Sorensen, and Scott J. Rasmussen (2010), “Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales,”
Marketing Science
29, no. 5, 815–27.

the Kit Kat tune:
Details about Kit Kat’s history came from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Kat
. Details about the coffee campaign came from an interview with Colleen Chorak on February 9, 2012.

one of the top ten “earworms”:
Details about the “Give me a Break” song being an earworm came from Kellaris, James (2003), “Dissecting Earworms: Further Evidence on the ‘Song-Stuck-in-Your Head’ Phenomenon,” presentation to the Society for Consumer Psychology. See also
http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20030227/songs-stick-in-everyones-head
.

ideas also have habitats:
Berger, Jonah, and Chip Heath (2005), “Idea Habitats: How the Prevalence of Environmental Cues Influences the Success of Ideas,”
Cognitive Science
29, no. 2, 195–221.

an experiment we conducted with BzzAgent and Boston Market:
Berger and Schwartz, “What Drives Immediate and Ongoing Word-of-Mouth?” 869–80.

“Bob, I’ve got emphysema”:
See
http://no-smoke.org/images/02_Bob_14x48.jpg
.

the poison parasite:
Cialdini, Robert B., Petia Petrova, Linda Demaine, Daniel Barrett, Brad Sagarin, Jon Manner, and Kelton Rhoads (2005), “The Poison Parasite Defense: A Strategy for Sapping a Stronger Opponent’s Persuasive Strength,” University of Arizona working paper.

Anheuser-Busch revised the slogan:
Cialdini, Robert B. (2001),
Influence: Science and Practice
(Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon).

Poke too many holes:
Information about the fan effect can be found in Anderson, John R. (1974), “Retrieval of Propositional Information from Long-term Memory,”
Cognitive Psychology
6, 451–74; and Anderson, John R. (1983),
The Architecture of Cognition
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).