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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content

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University of Pennsylvania

Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content

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Ever wondered why some things become popular, and other don't? Why some products becomes hits while others flop? Why some ideas take off while others languish? What are the key ideas behind viral marketing? This course explains how things catch on and helps you apply these ideas to be more effective at marketing your ideas, brands, or products. You'll learn how to make ideas stick, how to increase your influence, how to generate more word of mouth, and how to use the power of social networks to spread information and influence. Drawing on principles from his best-selling book, "Contagious: Why Things Catch On," Professor Jonah Berger illustrates successful strategies for you to use buzz to create virality so that your campaigns become more shareable on social media and elsewhere. By the end of this course, you'll have a better understanding of how to craft contagious content, build stickier messages, and get any product, idea, or behavior to catch on.

From the lesson

What Makes Ideas Sticky?

In this module, you'll start to learn what makes products, ideas, and behaviors contagious; in other words, why they catch on. You'll explore the science behind why some things become popular while others fail. You'll also discover the key principles, or six SUCCESs” factors that make messages stick. Finally, you'll learn how to make any idea more memorable, whether it’s a pitch to your boss or a lesson you want students to remember.

Course Introduction0:53

Contagious: How Things Catch On6:18

Making Messages Stick3:19

Emotional Stories6:16

Meet the Instructors

Jonah Berger
Associate Professor of Marketing
The Wharton School

The first principle we'll talk about to making ideas stick is simple.

And the simple idea behind simple is that less is more.

So imagine for a moment you're a business traveler.

You need to buy a new laptop.

Well there are different ways to pitch a product like that, right.

If you go to Dell's website, for example you might see a long list of information.

There's a Type I or Type II PC card.

There's an optional media base with a variety of different options.

There's docking, like a D/Port or a D/Dock or a D/View Laptop Stand.

There's different modular options, different types of DVD's and memory keys.

The information goes on and on and on.

Do you want an eight times DVD or

do you want a 24 times CD-RW/DVD floppy disk drive?

You're probably sitting there going, I have no clue.

It's a huge amount of information, and even if you're in IT or

you know technology, it's still pretty difficult to parse.

But that's not the only way to present information.

Let's watch a different approach to how a different

company thought about presenting a laptop.

[MUSIC]

So watching this video is great.

It's really emotional, it's really exciting to watch.

But think about how many attributes they talked in that video.

Think about how much you learned about that laptop.

Well if you think about it, at the core, you don't know anything about the number

of modular options, about the docking ports, about the PC card.

You only know one thing.

You know that laptop is really, really thin.

And how do you know that?

Well you saw the side picture.

It was very thin.

But you also saw that it fit in an envelope.

Think about that.

It must be thin if it can fit in an envelope, right?

They didn't say, hey we make a laptop that's a half-inch small or an inch small.

They said, look at it, it fits in a laptop.

We all know what an envelope is.

We all know how thick an envelope is.

And because that, we get a sense of how thick that laptop is.

And the important idea here is simple.

Tell people ten things, they're not gonna remember any of them.

They're focusing their attention on all ten of them and

one-tenth of their attention gets to each of those things.

But you tell people one thing and only one thing, and they'll remember

because they focused all their attention on that one particular thing.

But in thinking about what should we focus on or

how we can communicate that one particular thing, analogies are a really useful tool.

Think for a moment about a pomelo.

Do you know what a pomelo is?

Well, if you've never heard of it before, you probably don't.

But if you do know what it is, imagine you had to tell someone else what a pomelo is.

How would you describe it to a friend or a peer?

Well you might say it's a large grapefruit.

It's sort of the color of a tennis ball.

Now for those of you who didn't know what a pomelo is,

do you have some sense of what it is?

Probably.

You don't know perfectly, exactly what it is but if you had to guess you have some

sense of how big it is, it's larger than a grapefruit.

Some sense of what color it is, it's sort of a light green color.

And some sense of the other attributes it might have.

It's probably a fruit given it was compared to a grapefruit.

It's probably sour just like a grapefruit might be.

And so the point is while analogies don't tell us everything about a product or

idea, they get us to 90% of that idea pretty quickly.

They give us some good sense of what's there by quickly

comparing it to something we all know.

By taking something everybody knows and

relating this new idea that they don't understand to that thing they all know,

helps them get a good sense of that idea quite quickly.

And so in thinking about applying simple, what we wanna do is find the core.

Too often when we're communicating we say well this idea is, it can't be simplified.

It's too nuanced and complex.

Particularly if we're talking about a new piece of technology or

a complex message that you want people to understand.

We think we need to tell people everything to make sure they get the idea.

But importantly, if we tell them everything,

they're gonna remember nothing.

So we have to think about that one, maybe two things, that are most important for

them to remember from a message.

If the listener walked away with just one thing, what would that one thing be?

What's that core idea that we wanna make sure they remember?

And as we discussed, analogies can help.

It's like x but with y.

For example, when Facebook came out people described it as an online yearbook.

They took Facebook, something that no one had ever heard of before, and

they compared it to a yearbook, something that most people,

at least who have had a high school yearbook can understand.

By comparing it to something that everyone understands,

something that they know, we get some sense of what this new thing is.

And simple also has other benefits.

As we'll talk about soon, it leaves people wanting more,

it opens up what we'll call a curiosity gap and

it's an appetizer that pulls people in, rather than pushing them away.

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