Contagious: Why Things Catch On (24 page)

The same can be said for Blendtec’s
Will It Blend?
campaign. It’s impossible to tell the story of the clips where the blender tears through an iPhone
without talking about a blender. And without recognizing that the Blendtec blender in the videos must be extremely tough—so strong that it can blend almost anything. Which is exactly what Blendtec wants to communicate.

—————

In trying to craft contagious content, valuable virality is critical. That means making the idea or desired benefit a key part of the narrative. It’s like the plot of a good detective story. Some details are critical to the narrative and some are extraneous. Where
were the different suspects at the time of the murder? Critical. What was the detective eating for dinner while he mulled over the details of the case? Not so important.

The same distinction can be applied to the content we’ve been discussing. Take Ron Bensimhon’s Olympic stunt. Jumping into a pool? Critical.
GoldenPalace.com
? Pretty much irrelevant.

The importance of these different types of details becomes even clearer when people retell the story. Think about the story of the Trojan Horse. It has survived for thousands of years. There is a written account of the story, but most of the details people know come from hearing someone else talk about it. But which details people remember and retell? It isn’t random. Critical details stick around, while irrelevant ones drop out.

Psychologists Gordon Allport and Joseph Postman examined a similar issue more than fifty years ago. They were keenly interested in what happened to rumors as they spread from person to person. Did the stories stay the same as they were transmitted or did they change? And if they changed, were there predictable patterns in how rumors evolved?

To address this question, they had people play what most of us would describe as a game of Telephone.

First, someone was shown a picture of a detailed situation—in one case, a group of people on a subway car. The car appears to be an Eighth Avenue Express and it is going past Dyckman Street. There are various advertisements posted on the car, and five people are seated, including a rabbi and a mother carrying her baby. But the focus of the picture is two men having an argument. They are standing up, and one is pointing at the other and holding a knife.

Then the game of Telephone starts. The first person (transmitter) is asked to describe the picture to someone else (receiver), who cannot see it. The transmitter conveys the various details as
he sees fit. The transmitter then leaves the room and a new person enters. That new person becomes the receiver, and the original receiver becomes the transmitter, sharing what happened in the image with the new receiver, who also hasn’t seen the image. Then the original receiver leaves the room, a new person enters, and the game is repeated to a fourth, fifth, and eventually sixth person. Allport and Postman then looked at which story details persisted along the transmission chain.

They found that the amount of information shared dropped dramatically each time the rumor was shared. Around 70 percent of the story details were lost in the first five to six transmissions.

But the stories didn’t just become shorter: they were also sharpened around the main point or key details. Across dozens of transmission chains there were common patterns. Certain details were consistently left out and certain details were consistently retained. In the story about the subway car the first person telling the story mentioned all the details. They talked about how the subway car seemed to be an Eighth Avenue Express, how it was going past Dyckman Street, and how there were a number of people on it, two of them arguing.

But as the story was passed on down the telephone line, many of the unimportant details got stripped out. People stopped talking about what type of subway it was or where it was traveling and instead focused on the argument. The fact that one person was pointing at the other and brandishing a knife. Just as in the detective story, people mentioned the critical details and left out the extraneous ones.

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If you want to craft contagious content, try to build your own Trojan Horse. But make sure you think about valuable virality.
Make sure the information you want people to remember and transmit is critical to the narrative. Sure, you can make your narrative funny, surprising, or entertaining. But if people don’t connect the content back to you, it’s not going to help you very much. Even if it goes viral.

So build a Social Currency–laden, Triggered, Emotional, Public, Practically Valuable Trojan Horse, but don’t forget to hide your message inside. Make sure your desired information is so embedded into the plot that people can’t tell the story without it.

Epilogue

Ask three people where they got their last manicure, and chances are good that at least one of them had a Vietnamese nail technician. But the story of how it got that way might surprise you. It started with twenty women and a set of long coral nails.

She’d been a high school teacher in her home country, but
when Thuan Le arrived at Hope Village in 1975, she had nothing but the clothes on her back. The tent city outside Sacramento was a holding ground for Vietnamese refugees who escaped to America after the fall of Saigon. Teeming with new immigrants, the camp simultaneously brimmed with hope and despair. People had come to America with dreams of a better life for themselves and their families, but with little English knowledge, so the possibilities were limited.

Actress Tippi Hedren, who had starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
, was drawn to the refugees’ plight and would visit Hope Village every few days. Hedren wanted to help, so she became a mentor to some of the women. Former business owners, teachers, and government officials in Vietnam, these industrious women were eager to get to work. Hedren was enchanted by their stories
of Vietnam. They, in turn, noticed something about her: her beautiful nails.

The women admired Hedren’s glossy light pink fingernails, so she brought her manicurist in once a week to give them lessons. How to trim cuticles, wrap nails, and remove calluses. The women were quick studies and practiced on Hedren, themselves, and anyone they could get their hands on.

Soon a plan was hatched. Hedren got the women free classes at a nearby beauty school. They learned how to file, paint, and trim. Then Hedren asked around and helped Le and the other women find jobs in Santa Monica and surrounding cities.

It was tough at first. Manicures were not yet the rage and there was lots of competition. But Le and the other women passed their licensing exams and started doing business. They worked hard, labored long hours, and took the jobs no one else wanted. The women were diligent and kept at it. They made money and worked their way up.

Seeing Le’s success, a few of her friends decided to get into the business. They opened one of the first beauty salons owned by Vietnamese Americans and encouraged others to do the same.

The success stories soon spread. The thousands of Vietnamese who came to the United States looking for new possibilities heard what others were doing, and they listened. Vietnamese nail salons started opening up all around Sacramento. Then through the rest of California. Then the entire country. These twenty women started the trend, but soon it had a life of its own.

Today, 80 percent of manicurists in California are Vietnamese Americans. Nationwide the number is greater than 40 percent.

Vietnamese nail salons became contagious.

—————

The story of Thuan, Tippi, and the spread of Vietnamese nail salons is pretty amazing. But even more surprising is the fact that it’s not unique.

Other immigrant groups have cornered similar niches. Estimates suggest that
Cambodian Americans own approximately 80 percent of the doughnut shops in Los Angeles, and that
Koreans own 65 percent of the dry cleaners in New York City. In the 1850s,
60 percent of the liquor stores in Boston were run by Irishmen. In the early 1900s,
Jews produced 85 percent of men’s clothes. The list goes on.

When you think about it, these stories make a lot of sense. People move to a new country and start looking for work. But while the immigrants may have had various skilled jobs previously, their options in the new country are often limited. There is a language barrier, it’s tough to transfer previous certifications or qualifications, and they don’t have as many contacts as they had back home. So immigrants look to their friends and acquaintances for help.

And as with the rest of the products and ideas we’ve talked about throughout the book, social influence and word of mouth kick in. The topic of employment is frequent among new immigrants looking for work (Triggers). So they look to see what jobs other recent immigrants have taken (Public) and talk to them about the best opportunities. These more established immigrants want to look good (Social Currency) and help others (Practical Value) so they tell exciting (Emotion) narratives (Stories) about others they know who have been successful.

Soon these new immigrants follow their peers and pursue the same line of work.

—————

The story of Vietnamese manicurists, and immigrants’ choice of occupations more generally, highlights a number of points we’ve discussed throughout the book.

First, any product, idea, or behavior can be contagious. We’ve talked about blenders (
Will It Blend?
), bars (Please Don’t Tell), and breakfast cereals (Cheerios). “Naturally” exciting products, like discount shopping (Rue La La) and high-end restaurants (Barclay Prime’s hundred-dollar cheesesteak) and less traditionally buzz-worthy goods like corn (Ken Craig’s “Clean Ears Everytime”) and online search (Google’s “Parisian Love”). Products (iPod’s white headphones) and services (Hotmail) but also nonprofits (Movember and Livestrong bands), health behaviors (“Man Drinks Fat”), and whole industries (Vietnamese nail salons). Even soap (Dove’s “Evolution”). Social influence helps all sorts of products and ideas catch on.

Second, we saw that rather than being caused by a handful of special “influential” people, social epidemics are driven by the products and ideas themselves.

Sure, every great story has a hero. Tippi Hedren helped Vietnamese women learn about manicures, and George Wright had the creative idea that started
Will It Blend?
But while these individuals provided the initial spark, they’re only one small part of the story. Describing why a small handful of cool or connected people (so-called influentials) are not as important to social epidemics as we might think, sociologist
Duncan Watts makes a nice comparison to forest fires. Some forest fires are bigger than others, but no one would claim that the size of the fire depends on the exceptional nature of the initial spark. Big forest fires aren’t caused by big sparks. Lots of individual trees have to catch fire and carry the flames.

Contagious products and ideas are like forest fires. They can’t
happen without hundreds, if not thousands, of regular Joes and Janes passing the product or message along.

So why
did
thousands of people transmit these products and ideas?

And that’s where we get to the third point: certain characteristics make products and ideas more likely to be talked about and shared. You might have thought it was just random why some things catch on, that certain products and ideas just got lucky. But it’s not just luck. And it’s not a mystery. The same key principles drive all sorts of social epidemics. Whether it’s about getting people to save paper, see a documentary, try a service, or vote for a candidate, there is a recipe for success. The same six principles, or STEPPS, drive things to catch on.

So if we’re trying to make a product or idea contagious, think about how to build in these key STEPPS.

Some of this can happen in the design of the product or idea itself. The hundred-dollar cheesesteak was engineered to have Social Currency. Rebecca Black’s song was frequently triggered because of its title. Susan Boyle’s performance evoked lots of Emotion. Movember raised millions for men’s cancer by taking a once private behavior and using moustaches to make it Public.
Ken Craig’s “Clean Ears Everytime” video is two minutes of pure Practical Value.

But these STEPPS can also be built into messaging around a product or idea. Blendtec’s blenders had always been powerful, but by showing that power in a remarkable way, the
Will It Blend?
videos generated Social Currency and got people buzzing. Kit Kat didn’t change its product, but by linking it to a popular beverage (coffee), the company increased the number of Triggers to make people think (and talk) about the candy bar. People share Vanguard’s
MoneyWhys
because they provide Practical Value, but passing them along boosts word of mouth for the company itself. People shared Dove’s “Evolution” video because it evokes lots of Emotion, but by embedding itself in the narrative, Dove benefits from the chatter as well.

If you want to apply this framework, here’s a checklist you can use to see how well your product or idea is doing on the six different STEPPS.

Follow these six key STEPPS, or even just a few of them, and you can harness social influence and word of mouth to get any product or idea to catch on.

One last note. The best part of the STEPPS framework is that anyone can use it. It doesn’t require a huge advertising budget, marketing genius, or some sort of creativity gene. Yes, the viral videos and contagious content we’ve talked about were created by particular individuals, but not all of them were famous or could boast ten thousand followers on Twitter. They relied on one or more of the six key STEPPS and this made their products and ideas more contagious.