Contagious: Why Things Catch On (11 page)

The results were dramatic. Compared to the generic message, the message that grew the habitat (by associating Boston Market with dinner) increased word of mouth by 20 percent among people who previously had associated the brand only with lunch. Growing the habitat boosted buzz.

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Competitors can even be used as a trigger.

How can public health organizations compete against the marketing strength of better-funded rivals like cigarette companies? One way to combat this inequality is to transform a
weakness into a strength: by making a rival’s message act as a trigger for your own.

A famous antismoking campaign, for example, spoofed Marlboro’s iconic ads by captioning a picture of one Marlboro cowboy talking to another with the words: “
Bob, I’ve got emphysema.” So now whenever people see a Marlboro ad, it triggers them to think about the antismoking message.

Researchers call this strategy
the poison parasite because it slyly injects “poison” (your message) into a rival’s message by making it a trigger for your own.

WHAT MAKES FOR AN EFFECTIVE TRIGGER?

Triggers can help products and ideas catch on, but some stimuli are better triggers than others.

As we discussed, one key factor is how
frequently
the stimulus occurs. Hot chocolate would also have fitted really well with Kit Kat, and the sweet beverage might have even complemented the chocolate bar’s flavor better than coffee. But coffee is a more effective trigger because people think about and see it much
more frequently. Most people drink hot chocolate only in the winter, while coffee is consumed year-round.

Similarly, Michelob ran a successful campaign in the 1970s that linked weekends with the beer brand (“Weekends are made for Michelob”). However, that wasn’t the slogan when the campaign started out. Originally the slogan was “Holidays are made for Michelob.” But this proved ineffective because the chosen stimuli—holidays—don’t happen that often. So
Anheuser-Busch revised the slogan to “Weekends are made for Michelob,” which was much more successful.

Frequency, however, must also be balanced with the
strength
of the link. The more things a given cue is associated with, the weaker any given association. It’s like poking a hole in the bottom of a paper cup filled with water. If you poke just one hole, a strong stream of water will gush out. But poke more holes, and the pressure of the stream from each opening lessens.
Poke too many holes and you’ll get barely a trickle from each.

Triggers work the same way. The color red, for example, is associated with many things: roses, love, Coca-Cola, and fast cars, to name just a few. As a result of being ubiquitous, it’s not a particularly strong trigger for any of these ideas. Ask different people to say the word that first comes to their mind when they think of red and you’ll see what I mean.

Compare that with how many people think “jelly” when you say “peanut butter” and it will be clear why stronger, more unusual links are better. Linking a product or idea with a stimulus that is already associated with many things isn’t as effective as forging a fresher, more original link.

It is also important to pick triggers that happen near where the desired behavior is taking place. Consider a clever but ultimately ineffective public service ad from New Zealand. A handsome,
muscular man is taking a shower. In the background you hear a catchy jingle about HeatFlow, a new temperature-control system that ensures you’ll always have sufficient hot water for long, luxurious showers. The man turns off the water. When he opens the shower door, an attractive woman tosses him a towel. He smiles. She smiles. He begins to step out of the shower stall.

Suddenly, he slips. Falling, he cracks his head on the tile floor. As he lies there, motionless, his arm twitches slightly. A voice-over somberly intones: “Preventing slips around your home can be as easy as using a bath mat.”

Wow. Definitely surprising. Extremely memorable. So memorable, I think about it every time I take a shower in a bathroom that doesn’t have a mat on the floor.

But there’s only one problem.

I can’t buy a bath mat in a bathroom. The message is physically removed from the desired behavior. Unless I leave the bathroom, turn on my laptop, and buy a mat online, I have to remember the message until I get to a store.

Contrast that with a New York City Department of Health (DOH) antisoda campaign. While soda might seem like a relatively low-calorie item compared to all the food we eat during the course of a day, drinking sugary beverages actually has a big impact on weight gain. But the DOH didn’t just want to tell people how much sugar was in soda, it wanted to make sure people would remember to change their behavior and spread the message to others.

So the DOH made a video showing someone opening what seems like a normal soda can. But when he starts to pour it into a glass,
out spills fat. Blob after blob of white, chunky fat. The guy picks the glass up and knocks the fat back just as one would a regular soda—chunks and all.

The “Man Drinks Fat” clip closes with a huge congealed chunk of fat being dropped on a dinner plate. It oozes over the table as a message flashes up on the screen: “Drinking one can of soda a day can make you 10 pounds fatter a year. So don’t drink yourself fat.”

The video is clever. But by showing fat pouring out of a can, the DOH also nicely leveraged triggers. Unlike the bath mat ad, its video triggered the message (don’t consume sugary drinks) at precisely the right time: when people are thinking of drinking a soda.

CONSIDER THE CONTEXT

These campaigns underscore how important it is to consider the context: to think about the environments of the people a message or idea is trying to trigger. Different environments contain different stimuli. Arizona is surrounded by desert. Floridians see lots of palm trees. Consequently, different triggers will be more or less effective depending on where people live.

Similarly, the effectiveness of the hundred-dollar cheesesteak that we talked about in the introduction depends on the city where it is introduced.

A hundred-dollar sandwich is pretty remarkable, wherever you are. But how frequently people will be triggered to think about it depends on geography. In places where people eat lots of cheesesteaks (Philadelphia), people would be triggered often, but in other places (such as Chicago) not so much.

Even within a given city or geographic region, people experience different triggers based on the time of day or year. One study we conducted around Halloween, for example, found that people were much more likely to think about
products associated with the color orange (such as orange soda or Reese’s Pieces) the day before Halloween than a week later. Before Halloween, all the orange stimuli in the environment (pumpkins and orange displays) triggered thoughts of orange products. But as soon as the holiday was over, those triggers disappeared, and so did thoughts of orange products. People moved on to thinking about Christmas or whatever holiday came next.

So when thinking about, say, how to remember to take your reusable grocery bags to the grocery store, think about what will trigger you at exactly the right time. Using reusable grocery bags is like eating more vegetables. We know we should do it. We even want to do it (most of us have bought the bags). But when it comes time to take action, we forget.

Then, right as we pull into the grocery store parking lot, we remember. Argh, I forgot the reusable grocery bags! But by then it’s too late. We’re at the store and the grocery bags are at home in the closet.

It’s no accident that we think about reusable bags right when we get to the store. The grocery is a strong trigger for the bags. But unfortunately it is a badly timed one. Just as with the bath mat public service announcement, the idea is coming to mind, but at the wrong time. To solve this problem, we need
to be reminded to bring the bags right when we are leaving the house.

What’s a good trigger in this instance? Anything you have to take with you to buy groceries. Your shopping list, for example, is a great one. Imagine if every time you saw your shopping list, it made you think of your reusable bags. It would be much harder to leave the bags at home.

WHY CHEERIOS GETS MORE WORD OF MOUTH THAN DISNEY WORLD

To return to the example that started the chapter, triggers help explain why Cheerios get more word of mouth than Disney World. True, Disney World is interesting and exciting. To use the language of other chapters in the book, it has high Social Currency and evokes lots of Emotion (next chapter). But the problem is that people don’t think about it very frequently. Most people don’t go to Disney World unless they have kids. Even those who do go don’t go that often. Once a year if that. And there are few triggers to remind them about the experience after the initial excitement evaporates.

But hundreds of thousands of people eat Cheerios for breakfast every day. Still more see the bright orange boxes every time they push their shopping carts down the supermarket cereal aisle. And these triggers make Cheerios more accessible, increasing the chance that people will talk about the product.

The number of times Cheerios and Disney are mentioned on Twitter illustrates this nicely. Cheerios are mentioned more frequently than Disney World. But examine the data closely and
you’ll notice a neat pattern.

Mention of Cheerios on Twitter

Mentions of Cheerios spike every day at approximately the same time. The first references occur at 5:00 a.m. They peak between 7:30 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. And they diminish around 11:00 a.m. This sharp increase and corresponding decline align precisely with the traditional time for breakfast. The pattern even shifts slightly on weekends when people eat breakfast later. Triggers drive talking.

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Triggers are the foundation of word of mouth and contagiousness. To use an analogy, think of most rock bands. Social Currency is the front man or woman. It’s exciting, fun, and gets lots of attention. Triggers could be the drummer or bassist. It’s not as sexy a concept as Social Currency, but it’s an important workhorse that gets the job done. People may not pay as much attention to it, but it lays the groundwork that drives success. The more something is triggered, the more it will be top of mind, and the more successful it will become.

So we need to consider the context. Like Budweiser’s “wassup” or Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” our products and ideas need to take advantage of existing triggers. We also need to grow the habitat. Like Colleen Chorak’s Kit Kat and coffee, we need to create new links to prevalent triggers.

Triggers and cues lead people to talk, choose, and use. Social currency gets people talking, but Triggers keep them talking. Top of mind means tip of tongue.

3.
Emotion

By October 27, 2008, Denise Grady had been writing about science for
The New York Times
for more than a decade. With an eye for quirky topics and a deft narrative style, Grady won numerous journalism prizes by making esoteric topics accessible to lay readers.

That day, one of Grady’s articles rocketed up the newspaper’s Most E-Mailed list. Within hours of its publication thousands of people had decided to pass on the article to their friends, relatives, and coworkers. Grady had scored a viral hit.