Contagious: New Terms with Old Ideas?

Book Title: Contagious

Author: Jonah Berger

Length: 256 pages

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: $18.89

Picture is produced by www.topmba.com

Contagious: New Terms with Old Ideas?

Rahnuma Ahmed

What makes products, ideas, and behaviors viral? Jonah Berger knows the answer best! Berger is the James G. Campbell Associate Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His book titled Contagious is mainly about  social epidemics, which have always been his areas of interest.

In this book, Berger introduces an interesting model called STEPPS for explaining what makes content contagious and popular. The concept of contagious was positively linked with products, ideas and behavior. The model talks about six key principles to make content contagious:

•      Develop Social Currency by crafting messages (with inner remarkability) in a way that will help them to achieve desired impressions.
•      Link Triggers or the stimuli with products and ideas to make people think about desired things.
•      Evoke right Emotions with the content.
•      Make products and ideas more Public or visible.
•      Show the Practical value of the product and idea.
•      Tell Stories with values to deliver message

Berger also included some real-life examples of every principles of the STEPPS model.

Jonah Berger, the writer of the book
Picture is produced by jonahberger.com

Although Berger wrote and introduced the model in an interesting way, the elements of the model and the strategies are not quite new for the marketing, public relations, communication and advertising field. These fields have been practicing these strategies for a long time, may be with different terms. 

Still, it was interesting to read how the author utilized the term contagious and build a motivating concept around it. His way of explaining the terms was charming, new and, indeed, practical. I think, readers can take it as an interesting book to read.