It doesn’t require a huge advertising budget, marketing genius, or some sort of creativity gene.” By following the STEPPS, he claims, “you can make any product or idea contagious.” The best part of his framework, Berger announces, “is that anyone can use it.
Given the ratio of failure to success in spreading the word about anything at all, the conclusion to Berger’s interesting book seems too sanguine. Did the slogan “Each and every dining tray needs five fruits and veggies a day,” printed in different colors and fonts, and shown 20 times to college students, have a lasting impact on their eating habits? Have the bigger logos on Ralph Lauren and Lacoste shirts boosted sales? Do “I Voted” stickers increase turnout? Do the factoids placed under Snapple caps get passed along to friends, without calling attention to the product? More generally, do “sale prices,” which have become ubiquitous, still have the power to attract customers? Injecting poison into an iconic ad, they put a caption on a picture of two Marlboro Men that read: “Bob, I’ve got emphysema.” Anti-drug ads, Berger notes, backfired when they spread the word that lots of teens were using, making some other teenagers more willing to experiment.īerger acknowledges that the challenge for advertisers involves “cutting through the clutter,” but he does not always indicate how successful the ads he cites were in doing so. Public health organizations used a different strategy, called “the poison parasite” by researchers, for an antismoking campaign. Within a few years the idea spread to Denmark, Ireland, South Africa, and Taiwan and $174 million was raised. They asked donors to grow handlebar mustaches for a month to raise awareness about the disease. To raise money to fight prostate cancer, he writes, a group of guys in Melbourne, Australia, found a way to go public with a heretofore private act.
Most interesting of all, however, are the examples Berger cites of successful and unsuccessful marketing campaigns. Narrower content, he says, may get shared more often because it reminds the speaker of something. Each day, Berger reveals, Americans, on average, engage in 16 conversations in which they say something about aīrand, product, organization, or service. “Contagious” contains arresting - and counterintuitive - facts and insights.
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