Contagious: Why Things Catch On (8 page)

Furthermore,
as soon as you pay people for doing something, you crowd out their intrinsic motivation. People are happy to talk about companies and products they like, and millions of people do it for free every day, without prompting. But as soon as you offer to pay people to refer other customers, any interest they had in doing it for free will disappear. Customers’ decisions to share or not will no longer be based on how much they like a product or service. Instead, the quality and quantity of buzz will be proportional to the money they receive.

Social incentives, like social currency, are more effective in the long term. Foursquare doesn’t pay users to check in to bars, and airlines don’t give discounts to frequent flier members. But by harnessing people’s desire to look good to others, their customers did these things anyway—and spread word of mouth for free.

PLEASE DON’T TELL? WELL, OKAY. MAYBE JUST ONE PERSON . . .

How do we get people talking and make our products and ideas catch on? One way is to mint social currency. People like to make a good impression, so we need to make our products a way to achieve that. Like Blendtec’s
Will It Blend?
we need to find the inner remarkability. Like Foursquare or airlines with frequent flier tiers, we need to leverage game mechanics. Like Rue La La, we need to use scarcity and exclusivity to make people feel as if they’re insiders.

The drive to talk about ourselves brings us back full circle to Please Don’t Tell. The proprietors are smart. They understand that secrets boost social currency, but they don’t stop there. After
you’ve paid for your drinks, your server hands you a small business card. All black, almost like the calling card of a psychic or wizard. In red script the card simply says “Please Don’t Tell” and includes a phone number.

So while everything else suggests the proprietors want to keep the venue under wraps, at the end of the experience they make sure you have their phone number. Just in case you want to share their secret.

^*
Note that making access difficult is different from making it impossible. Sure, getting a reservation at Please Don’t Tell is tough, but if people call enough they should be able to snag a reservation. And while Rue La La is open only to members, it recently instituted a policy where even nonmembers can get access by signing up with an e-mail address. Using scarcity and exclusivity early on and then relaxing the restrictions later is a particularly good way to build demand.

Also be wary of how restricting availability can come off as snooty or standoffish. People are used to getting what they want and if they hear “no” too much they may go elsewhere. Jim Meehan at Please Don’t Tell addresses this problem explicitly by instructing his staff that if they need to say “no” they should try to figure out a way to say “no, but.” Such as, “No, we are all booked up at eight-thirty, unfortunately, but how about eleven?” or “No, we don’t have brand X but we have brand Y, would you like to try it?” By managing the disappointment, they maintain the allure while also maintaining customer satisfaction.

2.
Triggers

Walt Disney World. Say those words to children under the age of eight and just wait for their excited screams. More than 18 million people from all over the world visit the Orlando, Florida, theme park annually. Older kids love the frightening plummet down Space Mountain and the Tower of Terror. Younger ones savor the magic of Cinderella’s castle and the thrill of exploring the rivers of Africa in the Jungle Cruise. Even adults beam joyously when shaking hands with beloved Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Goofy.

Memories of my own first visit in the early 1990s still make me smile. My cousin and I were picked from the audience to play Gilligan and the Skipper in a reenactment of
Gilligan’s Island.
The look of wild triumph on my face when I successfully steered the boat to safety—after being doused with dozens of buckets of water—is still family lore.

Now compare these exhilarating images with a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. Yes, the classic breakfast cereal with a bee mascot that “packs the goodness of Cheerios with the irresistible taste of golden honey.” Considered reasonably healthy, Honey Nut
Cheerios is still sugary enough to appeal to children and anyone with a sweet tooth and has become a staple of many American households.

Which of these products—Disney World or Honey Nut Cheerios—do you think gets more word of mouth? The Magic Kingdom? The self-described place where dreams come true?

Or Cheerios? The breakfast cereal made of whole grain oats that can help reduce cholesterol?

Clearly, the answer is Disney World, right? After all, talking about your adventures there is much more interesting than discussing what you ate for breakfast. If word-of-mouth pundits agree on anything, it’s that being interesting is essential if you want people to talk. Most buzz marketing books will tell you that. So will social media gurus. “
Nobody talks about boring companies, boring products, or boring ads,” argues one prominent word-of-mouth advocate.

Unfortunately, he’s wrong. And so is everyone else who subscribes to the interest-is-king theory. And lest you think this contradicts what we talked about in the previous chapter about Social Currency, read on.
People talk about Cheerios more than Disney World. The reason?
Triggers.

BUZZING FOR BZZAGENT

No one would mistake Dave Balter for a Madison Avenue shark as portrayed in the popular TV series
Mad Men.
He’s young—just forty—and looks even younger, with downy cheeks, wire-rimmed glasses, and a wide-open grin. He’s also genuinely passionate about marketing. Yes,
marketing.
To Dave, marketing isn’t about trying to convince people to purchase things they don’t want or need. Marketing is about tapping into their genuine enthusiasm
for products and services that they find useful. Or fun. Or beautiful. Marketing is about spreading the love.

Dave started out as a so-called loyalty marketer figuring out ways to reward customers for sticking with a particular brand. He then created and sold two promotional agencies before founding his current firm, BzzAgent.

Here’s how BzzAgent works. Say you’re Philips, the maker of the Sonicare electric toothbrush. Sales are good, but the product is new and most people aren’t aware of what it is or why they would want to buy one. Existing Sonicare customers are beginning to spread the word, but you want to accelerate things, get more people talking.

That’s where BzzAgent comes in.

Over the years, the company has assembled a network of more than 800,000 BzzAgents, people who have said that they are interested in learning about and trying new products. Agents span a broad range of ages, incomes, and occupations. Most are between eighteen and fifty-four years old, are well educated, and have a reasonable income. Teachers, stay-at-home moms, working professionals, PhDs, and even CEOs are BzzAgents.

If you wonder what type of person would be a BzzAgent, the answer is
you.
Agents reflect the U.S. population at large.

When a new client calls, Dave’s team culls through its large database to find BzzAgents who fit the desired demographic or psychographic profile. Philips believes its toothbrush will primarily appeal to busy professionals aged twenty-five to thirty-five from the East Coast? No problem, Dave has several thousand on call. You’d prefer working moms who care about dental hygiene? He’s got them, too.

BzzAgent then contacts the appropriate agents in its network and invites them to join a campaign. Those who agree get a kit in
the mail containing information about the product and coupons or a free trial. Participants in the Sonicare campaign, for example, received a free toothbrush and ten-dollar mail-in rebates for additional toothbrushes to give to others. Participants in a Taco Bell campaign received free taco coupons. Because actual tacos are difficult to send in the mail.

Then, over the next few months, BzzAgents file reports describing the conversations they had about the product. Importantly, BzzAgents are not paid. They’re in it for the chance to get free stuff and learn about new products before the rest of their friends and families. And they’re never pressured to say anything other than what they honestly believe, whether they like the product or not.

—————

When people first hear about BzzAgent, some argue that it can’t possibly work. People don’t just spontaneously mention products in everyday conversations, they protest. It just wouldn’t seem natural.

But what most people don’t realize is that they naturally talk about products, brands, and organizations all the time. Every day, the average American engages in more than
sixteen word-of-mouth episodes, separate conversations where they say something positive or negative about an organization, brand, product, or service. We suggest restaurants to coworkers, tell family members about a great sale, and recommend responsible babysitters to neighbors.
American consumers mention specific brands more than 3 billion times a day. This kind of social talk is almost like breathing. It’s so basic and frequent that we don’t even realize we’re doing it.

If you want to get a better sense for yourself, try keeping a conversation diary for twenty-four hours. Carry pen and paper
with you and write down all the things you mention over the course of a day. You’ll be surprised at all the products and ideas you talk about.

Curious about how a BzzCampaign worked, I joined. I’m a big fan of soy milk, so when Silk did a campaign for almond milk, I had to try it. (After all, how can they get milk from an almond?) I used a coupon, got the product from the store, and tried it. It was delicious.

Not only was the product good, it was so good I simply
had
to tell others about it. I mentioned Silk almond milk to friends who don’t drink regular milk and gave them coupons to try it themselves. Not because I had to. No one was looking over my shoulder to make sure I talked. I just liked the product and thought others might as well.

And this is exactly why BzzAgent and other word-of-mouth marketing firms are effective. They don’t force people to say nice things about products they hate. Nor do they entice people to insert product recommendations artificially into conversations. BzzAgent simply harnesses the fact that people already talk about and share products and services with others. Give people a product they enjoy, and they’ll be happy to spread the word.

WHY DO PEOPLE BUZZ ABOUT SOME PRODUCTS MORE THAN OTHERS?

BzzAgent has run hundreds of campaigns for clients as diverse as Ralph Lauren, the March of Dimes, and Holiday Inn Express. Some campaigns were more successful at generating word of mouth than others. Why? Did some products or ideas just get lucky? Or were there some underlying principles driving certain products to get talked about more?

I offered to help find the answer. Enthusiastic at the prospect,
Dave gave my colleague Eric Schwartz and me access to data from the hundreds of campaigns he’d run over the years.

We started by testing an intuitive idea: interesting products get talked about more than boring ones. Products can be interesting because they’re novel, exciting, or confound expectations in some way. If interest drives talking, then action flicks and Disney World should be talked about more than Cheerios and dish soap.

Intuitively this makes sense. As we discussed in the Social Currency chapter, when we talk to others, we’re not only communicating information; we’re also saying something about ourselves. When we rave about a new foreign film or express disappointment with the Thai restaurant around the corner, we’re demonstrating our cultural and culinary knowledge and taste. Since we want others to think we’re interesting, we search for interesting things to tell them. After all, who’d want to invite people to a cocktail party if all they talked about was dish soap and breakfast cereal?

Based on this idea, advertisers often try to create surprising or even shocking ads. Dancing monkeys or ravenous wolves chasing a marching band. Guerrilla and viral marketing campaigns are built on the same notion: Have people dress in chicken suits and hand out fifty-dollar bills on the subway. Do something really different or people won’t talk.

But is this actually true? Do things have to be interesting to be discussed?

To find out, we took the hundreds of products that had taken part in BzzCampaigns and asked people how interesting they found each of them. An automatic shower cleaning device? A service that preserves newborn babies’ umbilical cords? Both seemed pretty interesting. Mouthwash and trail mix? Not so interesting.

Then we looked at the relationship between a product’s
interest score and how frequently it was talked about over the ten-week campaign.

But there was none. Interesting products didn’t receive any more word of mouth than boring ones.

Puzzled, we took a step back. Maybe “interest” was the wrong term, potentially too vague or general a concept? So we asked people to score the products on more concrete dimensions, like how novel or surprising they were. An electronic toothbrush was seen as more novel than plastic storage bags; dress shoes designed to be as comfortable as sneakers were seen as more surprising than bath towels.

But there was still no relationship between novelty or surprise scores and overall word of mouth. More novel or surprising products didn’t get more buzz.

Maybe it was the people scoring the products. We had first used undergraduate college students, so we recruited a new set of people, of all ages and backgrounds.

Nope. Again the results remained the same. No correlation between levels of interest, novelty, or surprise and the number of times people talked about the products.

We were truly bewildered. What were we doing wrong?

Nothing, as it turned out. We just weren’t asking the right questions.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IMMEDIATE AND ONGOING WORD OF MOUTH

We had been focused on
whether
certain aspects matter—specifically, whether more interesting, novel, or surprising products get talked about more. But as we soon realized, we also should have been examining
when
they matter.