University of California, Riverside BUS 103 Contagious Book Review

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Berger, Jonah. Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Simon & Schuster, 2013. (1-141). Central Theme: Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger is a book that that aims to explain why a product or ... service by a company becomes popular and/or viral. As you can assume from the title, the main goal of the book is to explain what makes these “things” contagious. After doing his research, Berger noticed that there are six principles that are apparent that are needed to get people talking and spreading your idea or message. The six principles that Berger mentions are social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value, and stories, also known as, STEPPS. These six key “STEPPS” will cause your idea or message to be talked about, shared and even imitated by other and Berger spends one chapter on each step the rest of the book explaining it more in detail. Social currency is the main topic at hand in the first chapter. Social currency is the idea of making people look good and feel good about themselves while they’re promoting your idea and product. A product with good social currency will spread fast through word of mouth by their current customers. Having your product shared through word of mouth gives the opportunity to other people to really gauge the emotions and experience of the person talking about the product. With this type of communication, the product really sticks to people because they feel like they’re getting insider information from a person who has used the product and they can relate more rather than a simple review by a media outlet. The three main ways to mint social currency are to find remarkability, good game mechanics and make people feel like insiders according to Berger. Remarkability can be explained by the quote “appearance matters.” By this, it means that your product should stand out and be worthy of attention by people. The key to making your product stand out is to make som [Show More]

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