Contagious Book Summary – Why Things Catch On

Author: Jonah Berger

Synopsis
Contagious (2013) helps you understand what people find contagious in your products or ideas you’d like to spread. Contagious lays out eight basic principles, including the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. It is a business bestseller that explores why some ideas and products become wildly popular with new research, new stories, and practical advice for individuals and organizations.
contagious book summary
Source: amazon.com

Detailed Summary of Contagious Book

A few characteristics make up the core of what makes a video go viral. One is how easy it is to pass on, and another is its level of curiosity. This isn’t to say that bad taste, cliché, or bad quality is all it takes for a video to go viral. Rather, there are certain qualities in a video that make it contagious.

A closer look at the process of creating and spreading content on the Internet reveals that luck has very little to do with it. Specific, actionable steps can be taken to make a product go viral.

The thing is, these steps have been studied and tested. There exists a science to creating and sharing content. The most popular books, videos, articles, and anything on social media aren’t always the ones with the best reviews or those that are simply in the right place at the right time.

It’s often a matter of how the concept or product is framed and whether it addresses a particular need or gap in the market – one that many people (not just a few) identify with.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a matter of being contagious. So, what makes a video contagious? Jonah Berger has broken down some factors that make up the core of what makes a video go viral, which I’ll review below in the Contagious book summary.

Contagious Book Summary Key Points

What effective strategies do you have to develop to promote or sell your products and ideas? What are the potential tips for creating influential content? The following key points will reveal how you can create contagious content by keeping in mind your audience and their requirements. Moreover, the tips below will also help you upgrade your marketing knowledge.

You might also like to read Behind The Cloud Summary.

Word of Mouth-The most important marketing strategy

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful marketing mechanisms. Social media spreads a lot, but not always. Most of what goes viral on social media are cat videos, funny pictures, and things that can be shared quickly by many different people (like clickbait). Still, today, more than ever, people care about what their friends are reading, buying,g and doing.

How do you promote your book, and how do you grow your brand? How do you get more people to come to your author’s signing? Also, How do you create a buzz around your podcast?

Word-of-mouth is what makes it happen. And word-of-mouth is the reason why social media and advertising will never be efficient in creating movements and gaining sales. The content that we post on social media is marketing. We’re trying to get users to engage with the brand, and our efforts are marketing tactics designed to increase brand awareness, follower count, and shares.

The reality is that people trust their family, friends, and others around them, not companies. So, when someone says that a product is great or a service is doing something different, it resonates with people and interests them. If you want to get the word out about your product, service,e or brand, you must get the word out to those who care about you.

Use triggers in a way that Male people think about your Brand

Great marketers know that the best marketing is conversational. Trying to “spread the word” about a product, service, or idea helps create a trigger that serves as an everyday reminder. For decades, a magazine subscription label was one of the biggest triggers in consumers’ minds.

Human minds are hardwired to remember only about 20% of what we see and roughly 65% of what we hear. In terms of virality, this means that the easiest way to get people to remember your product is to find a clever way to incorporate it into a real-world experience.

Granted, those experiences are not always simple or easy to come across—but they happen daily. For example, someone might think about your product every time they sit down on a plane, turn on their phone’s GPS, check for the weather, or take out their key fob.

These are all triggers that go beyond just seeing your logo on something. They’re a part of or connected to the person’s daily routine, so the likelihood of them thinking of your product increases naturally.

Today, e-commerce companies aren’t limited to physical triggers in-store or on a shelf. Today, one of the biggest online triggers is something you might not expect: your inbox.

Create stories around your ideas or brands-our subconscious attracts them

Psychologists like to say that the mind is trained to learn through stories.  He says that even though people liked the self-cleaning oven, it wasn’t a big success until they created a story around it. When they took consumers through their whole experience while using it, they started to worry about burning themselves and ruining their food. In a nutshell, they created a narrative that made the disease stick.

The same goes for Trump. Most people like him or at least think he will be a good president. But why do his negative traits not stick? Because Trump has built his brand around stories of success, money,y, and power. Berger has a few different bits of advice that center around the idea of storytelling.

He emphasizes the importance of creating narratives. You should have stories that you can use to explain your product or idea and not just cold, hard facts. Narratives are more interesting than statistics, anyways.

This includes how we learn from friends, books, teachers,s and the media. The stories we hear are the ones we remember. Even when we read about statistics and other studies, those things stick when there is a story behind them.

So, If you want your ideas and brands to influence your audience’s mind, you need to build up a story around your brand that how it started,d and how It’s going on because our unconscious mind is more attracted to it.

Contagious Book Quotes

“Making things more observable makes them easier to imitate, which makes them more likely to become popular.” Jonah Berger

“Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 percent to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.” Jonah Berger

Contagious Book Review

Overall, this is the best book if you are looking for marketing tips and strategies. This is easy to read, entertaining, and creates value through real-life stories.  Even if you are an expert in this field, you may learn something new from this book. Plus, the point is that you don’t need a dictionary! Because the writing style is so eloquent.

To whom would I recommend Contagious Book Summary?

  • A marketing student wants to increase his knowledge.
  • Anyone who wants to take his brand to the next level.
  • Anyone who wants to build his brand or work for some marketing agency.

Link: https://amzn.to/3vtilLz