Contagious Why Things Catch On

Consumer Reports
Best Buy and skip the story about how the
laptop we bought ended up being cheaper at another store.
Word of mouth, then, is a prime tool for making a good impression—as potent as that new car or
Prada handbag. Think of it as a kind of currency. 
Social currency.
Just as people use money to buy
products or services, they use social currency to achieve desired positive impressions among their
families, friends, and colleagues.
So to get people talking, companies and organizations need to mint social currency. Give people a
way to make themselves look good while promoting their products and ideas along the way. There
are three ways to do that: (1) find inner remarkability; (2) leverage game mechanics; and (3) make
people feel like insiders.
INNER REMARKABILITY
Imagine it’s a sweltering day and you and a friend stop by a convenience store to buy some drinks.
You’re tired of soda but you feel like something with more flavor than just water. Something light and
refreshing. As you scan the drink case, a pink lemonade Snapple catches your eye. Perfect. You grab
it and take it up to the cash register to pay.
Once outside, you twist the top off and take a long drink. Feeling sufficiently revitalized, you’re
about to get in your friend’s car when you notice something written on the inside of the Snapple cap.

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Real Fact # 27: A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber.
Wow. Really?
You’d probably be pretty impressed (after all, who even knew glass could bounce), but think for a
moment about what you’d do next. What would you do with this newfound tidbit of information?
Would you keep it to yourself or would you tell your friend?
—————
In 2002, Marke Rubenstein, executive VP of Snapple’s ad agency, was trying to think of new ways
to entertain Snapple customers. Snapple was already known for its quirky TV ads featuring the
Snapple Lady, a peppy, middle-aged woman with a thick New York accent, who read and answered
letters from Snapple fans. She was a real Snapple employee, and the letter writers ranged from
people asking for dating advice to people soliciting Snapple to host a soiree at a senior citizens
home. The ads were pretty funny, and Snapple was looking for something similarly clever and
eccentric.
During a marketing meeting, someone suggested that the space under the cap was unused real
estate. Snapple had tried putting jokes under the cap with little success. But the jokes were terrible
(“If the #2 pencil is the most popular, why is it still #2?”), so it was hard to tell if it was the strategy
or the jokes that were failing. Rubenstein and her team wondered whether real facts might work
better. Something “out of the ordinary that [Snapple drinkers] wouldn’t know and wouldn’t even
know they’d want to know.”
So Rubenstein and her team came up with a long list of clever trivia facts and began putting them
under the caps—visible only after customers have purchased and opened the bottles.
Fact #12, for example, notes that kangaroos can’t walk backward. Fact #73 says that the average
person spends two weeks over his/her lifetime waiting for traffic lights to change.
These facts are so surprising and entertaining that it’s hard not to want to share them with someone
else. Two weeks waiting for the light to change? That’s unbelievable! How do they even calculate
something like that? Think of what else we could do with that time! If you’ve ever happened to drink
a Snapple with a friend, you’ll find yourself telling each other which fact you received—similar to
what happens when your family breaks open fortune cookies after a meal at a Chinese restaurant.
Snapple facts are so infectious that they’ve become embedded in popular culture. Hundreds of
websites chronicle the various facts. Comedians poke fun at them in their routines. Some of the facts
are so unbelievable that people even debate back and forth whether they are actually correct. (Yes,
the idea that kangaroos can’t walk backward does seem pretty crazy, but it’s true.)
Did you know that frowning burns more calories than smiling? That an ant can lift fifty times its
own weight? You probably didn’t. But people share these and similar Snapple facts because they are
remarkable.
And talking about remarkable things provides social currency.
—————
Remarkable things are defined as unusual, extraordinary, or worthy of notice or attention.
Something can be remarkable because it is novel, surprising, extreme, or just plain interesting. But the
most important aspect of remarkable things is that they are 
worthy of remark.
Worthy of mention.
Learning that a ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber is just so noteworthy that you
have to mention it.
Remarkable things provide social currency because they make the people who talk about them
seem, well, more remarkable. Some people like to be the life of the party, but no one wants to be the

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death of it. We all want to be liked. The desire for social approval is a fundamental human
motivation. If we tell someone a cool Snapple fact it makes us seem more engaging. If we tell
someone about a secret bar hidden inside a hot dog restaurant, it makes us seem cool. Sharing
extraordinary, novel, or entertaining stories or ads makes people seem more extraordinary, novel, and
entertaining. It makes them more fun to talk to, more likely to get asked to lunch, and more likely to get
invited back for a second date.
Not surprisingly, then, remarkable things get brought up more often. In one study, Wharton
professor Raghu Iyengar and I analyzed how much word of mouth different companies, products, and
brands get online. We examined a huge list of 6,500 products and brands. Everything from big brands
like Wells Fargo and Facebook to small brands like the Village Squire Restaurants and Jack Link’s.
From every industry you can imagine. Banking and bagel shops to dish soaps and department stores.
Then we asked people to score the remarkability of each product or brand and analyzed how these
perceptions were correlated with how frequently they were discussed.
The verdict was clear: more remarkable products like Facebook or Hollywood movies were
talked about almost twice as often as less remarkable brands like Wells Fargo and Tylenol. Other
research finds similar effects. More interesting tweets are shared more, and more interesting or
surprising articles are more likely to make the 
New York Times
Most E-Mailed list.
Remarkability explains why people share videos of eight-year-old girls flawlessly reciting rap
lyrics and why my aunt forwarded me a story about a coyote who was hit by a car, got stuck in the
bumper for six hundred miles, and survived. It even explains why doctors talk about some patients
more than others. Every time there is a patient in the ER with an unusual story (such as someone
swallowing a weird foreign object), everyone in the hospital hears about it. A code pink (baby
abduction) makes big news even if it’s a false alarm, while a code blue (cardiac arrest) goes largely
unmentioned.
Remarkability also shapes how stories evolve over time. A group of psychologists from the
University of Illinois recruited pairs of students for what seemed like a study of group planning and
performance. Students were told they would get to cook a small meal together and were escorted to a
real working kitchen. In front of them were all the ingredients necessary to cook a meal. Piles of leafy
green vegetables, fresh chicken, and succulent pink shrimp, all ready to be chopped and thrown into a
pan.
But then things got interesting. Hidden among the vegetables and chicken, the researchers had
planted a small—but decidedly creepy—family of cockroaches. Eww! The students shrieked and
recoiled from the food.
After the bedlam subsided, the experimenter said that someone must be playing a joke on them and
quickly canceled the study. But rather than send people home early, he suggested that they go