Jonah Berger's Contagious Summary

Improved Essays
Contagious is a book written by Jonah Berger, explaining why some products and services catch on while others are failed. In Contagious, “Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from products and services to policy initiatives and YouTube videos.” The six principles are Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories. Also refer to as STEPPS, according to Berger. The book contains six chapters and each chapter focuses on one of the six principles. The very first lesson I have learned from reading Contagious is how powerful the word of mouth can become. “The things others tell us, e-mail us, and text us have a significant impact on what we think, read, buy, and do” (7). For example, I have never thought of buying a stock my whole life until my roommate convinced me …show more content…
The three ways are inner remarkability, leverage game mechanics, and make people feel like an insider (36). Snapple did an amazing job finding a remarkable fact to keep customer engage. As the book said, I did not know that kangaroos cannot walk backward. Therefore, if I had a chance to read what is on a Snapple caps, of course, I would want to share the fact I received with my friends. Amazon Prime and Sam Club are a perfect example of making people feel like an insider. Amazon Prime is exclusive to Amazon member. The member has the right to select a free two-day shipping for eligible purchases, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Prime video, etc. While only a member could shop at Sam Club. The two example makes the customer feel like they are special. They are the insider that have access to the benefit from the

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Kohl's Corporation History

    • 1125 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Kohl’s Corporation History During 1962 in Brookfield, Wisconsin, Max Kohl opened his first department store, Kohl’s. With its opening emerged a new experience for shoppers. Shoppers were now able to find everything from shoes, car accessories, candy to sporting equipment in one place.…

    • 1125 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Throughout ‘Severing the Human Connection’ by H. Bruce Miller, the author illustrates the changes that have come to society’s strategy of dealing with criminals as well as his displeasure with them. Beginning at a self-serve gas station, the author finds the cashier is “locked inside a dark, glassed-in, burglar-proof cubical …with the biggest [sticker] of them all ‘PAY BEFORE PUMPING GAS,’” he goes on to find that this is society’s newest way of dealing with criminals, in this case, as the author writes “people who fill their tanks and tear out of the station without paying.” He says this an epidemic at the time, but doesn’t support the approach “…I cannot understand why I should be made to feel like John Dillinger every time I buy a tank of…

    • 190 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point turned into a representation of the very procedures he was depicting. Upon its 2000 discharge, the book became a national smash hit whose impact would help to start outlook changes in fields going from advertising to general wellbeing. The primary premise of The Tipping Point is that little things can prompt enormous changes. Gladwell begins this book by investigating the idea of pandemics utilizing STD episodes and other therapeutic plagues to show how something little can prompt something huge.…

    • 653 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The Hot Zone is a nonfiction novel written by Richard Preston; a book about “the terrifying true story of the origins of the Ebola virus” as the cover states. The novel is written in the perspective of the author, Richard Preston, as he interviews, medical staff, researchers and family members of the victims. The reader learns about the first of many known outbreaks of the virus, different strains of the virus, similar viruses and much more. The book is broken into four parts, each filled with different stories of the victims of the virus, but all tied together by one thing, the Ebola virus.…

    • 2165 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In his “The Tipping Point”, with the help of various illustrations, Gladwell points out how things become epidemic and how little things make big differences in social realities. Reading “The Law of the Few” made me think about how ideas and behavior can spread like diseases or viruses. Also, the book made me think of life as an epidemic. As far as I understand, one of the reasons why Gladwell brings examples of epidemics and viruses is that a lot of things in life, such as ideas, behavior and new products, spread similarly. Showing up unexpectedly from something insignificant and disappearing abruptly is the way epidemics work.…

    • 252 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Scientists and healthcare professionals have conducted un-ending researches to understand how a trend or outbreak becomes an epidemic or reaches a tipping point. Malcolm Gladwell tries to rationalize this phenomenon in his book “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” Gladwell, a staff writer for the New Yorker, was formerly a business and science reporter at the Washington Post whose interest in writing focused on trends and the nature of things. The author forms several theories and outlined key laws which contributes to his thesis that ideas, products, messages, trends and behaviors spread like viruses. He starts off with the ideology of the infamous brand of footwear called Hush Puppies.…

    • 741 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Transcommunality Summary

    • 534 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In the Childs’s reading on ‘Transcommunality’, he first stated that the desire to rooted affiliation is not the source of the problem for the crisis of diversity, but the lack of constructive and mutually respectful from interactions among the diverse settings is. He proposed Transcommunality as a way to maintain particularistic root affiliations while creating a corporation where both diverse and divergent that occur among partners are mutually recognized, accepted and understood. This Transcommunal approach entailed the concept of Pachukutiq’s ‘change of direction’ from a linear worldview to a more circular oriented path where all angles and approaches can lead to the same central point while maintaining their own distinct position. In other words, in the midst…

    • 534 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the article ‘Smarter Than You Think,’ by Clive Thompson, the author explains the comparison of the human mind vs machine intelligence. He talks about the speed of these machines in a game of chess and the millions of calculations it can make in just seconds. Compared with humans, these machines outmatch ourselves in everything expect in one way. Thompson explains even though machines are better they have trouble with “intelligence amplification,” but when paired together the possibilities are endless. Later in the article he dives into the factors of the internet, digital devices, social media, and more.…

    • 1395 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Can the average social media user live without exploring social media every hour? Social media is extremely popular among the teenagers, and it affects not only teenagers but other ages as well. The effects of social platforms have on teenagers are not sleeping, females are concerned about their image, and social skills. In today’s world, social media became a platform not only to interact, but to be a part of an online community. There are many reasons people use social media today, such to create developing friendships, start online relationships, or to discover what new things are happening worldwide.…

    • 1397 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Natural born Killers shows us to see the other side of the coin. Our humanness, and what is naturalized in killing, is more human than natural. To be human is to step apart and outside nature. We, humans, distinguish ourselves as more than nature. Somehow more conscious or self-aware in such a way that we can reject our basic foundations of our own absurdity.…

    • 908 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    It may not come as any surprise that society is greatly influenced by present-day social media such as Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. Celebrities have mass amounts of followers; they put their daily lives on the Internet for us to all see, and we all catch onto the latest fads. This is not a new concept, however. For as long as one could imagine, that is how long members of society have been influenced by pop culture. Through the examination of three approaches, the Functionalist, the Critical, and the Interaction, we are able to further understand how pop culture and mass media affects each and every one of us.…

    • 1018 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Kathleen Tan September 4, 2017 Ms. Mc Nierney Period 7 Survival of the Sickest by Dr. Sharon Moalem Big Idea 1: The process of evolution drives the diversity and unity of life. Passage 1: “In Europe, they used fermentation — and the resulting alcohol killed microbes, even when, as was often the case, it was mixed with water. On the other side of the world, people purified their water by boiling it and making tea. As a result, there was evolutionary pressure in Europe to have the ability to drink, break down, and detoxify alcohol, while the pressure in Asia was a lot less” (Moalem 60).…

    • 1576 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the short passage of The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan, he explains his views on the transition from verbal communication to writing words down on a paper, and also the constant advancement of technology. McLuhan proposed that writing words on a paper led to inventions such as book, roads and more. At the same time, writing caused Western society to live in a world of invisible lines. He emphasized that alphabet had no true meaning until lines were added to it. Also that before writing the world had no restrictions.…

    • 846 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    PART ONE: Specific Purpose Statement to inform the audience about social media PART TWO: Speech Sections Introduction Attention getter: Did you know 92% of teens go online daily and 24% go on constantly? Preview speech body: Everyday we are constantly using our phones and computers whether it be Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. Social networking sites play a constant role throughout today’s society whether it be negative or positive. Site like Facebook connect old friends or site Twitter and Instagram have become platforms to make people famous. But it has also become a sanction to hold people against their own personal information.…

    • 724 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    How Social Media Impacts the News We live in a truly wonderful time. The internet has connected our world in an unprecedented manner. Everyone with internet access has the entirety of human knowledge at their disposal and a means to contact nearly anyone in the world instantaneously. A product of the internet is what we refer to as “social media.” Social media makes it extremely easy to keep in touch with friends, family, and practically the whole world.…

    • 1300 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays