Conformity or Divergence?

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Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content

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University of Pennsylvania

Viral Marketing and How to Craft Contagious Content

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Ever wondered why some things become popular, and other don't? Why some products become hits while others flop? Why some ideas take off while others languish? What are the key ideas behind viral marketing? This course explains how things catch on and helps you apply these ideas to be more effective at marketing your ideas, brands, or products. You'll learn how to make ideas stick, how to increase your influence, how to generate more word of mouth, and how to use the power of social networks to spread information and influence. Drawing on principles from his best-selling book, "Contagious: Why Things Catch On," Professor Jonah Berger illustrates successful strategies for you to use buzz to create virality so that your campaigns become more shareable on social media and elsewhere. By the end of this course, you'll have a better understanding of how to craft contagious content, build stickier messages, and get any product, idea, or behavior to catch on.

À partir de la leçon

How Social Influence Shapes Behavior

In this module, you'll examine how social influence shapes everything people do: from the products we buy and candidates we vote for to the food we like and careers we pursue. You’ll learn how people use others to help them make choices and how companies leverage this power to shape the products and services we use. You'll discover when people are more likely to conform or do the same thing as others, and when they are more likely to diverge or do something different. At the end of this module, you'll understand how to avoid being influenced by others and how to use influence to make yourself more successful.

The Power of Social Influence8:03

Normative Influence5:49

Using Social Influence to Increase Success8:16

When Social Influence is Anti-Social5:36

Conformity or Divergence?3:24

Rencontrer les enseignants

Jonah Berger
Associate Professor of Marketing
The Wharton School

We've been talking about the fact that people diverge from others.

They avoid what other groups are doing if they don't wanna look like those folks.

But one important questions well, when this is happens?

Because we also just talked about conformity.

The idea that people do the same thing as others.

So, when the people do the same thing as others, and

when do they end up wanting to something different.

When do we conform versus when do we diverge.

Well, it turns out it depends a lot on the product category or

domain, and what that domain might say about us.

Imagine I asked you to make a choice.

Imagine I gave you three music artists, for example, and I asked you to pick one,

which one you like the best, Dave Mathews Band, Lady Gaga or Drake.

As you think about which one you like the best, and think about that in your mind.

Now, if I asked you to think about well which of these three bike lights do you

like better, Brand A, Brand B, or Brand C?

Think about which one you'd prefer there.

Now, you've got a pretty good idea of this experiment that I asked a number of

people to do.

I brought a couple hundred people into the laboratory, and I asked them to do

a simple study where they made choices in a number of different domains.

They wrote down their preferences in an Excel spreadsheet one domain by another.

They wrote down their subject number, their year in school, and then,

which car brand they preferred, which music artist they preferred, and

which bike light they prefer.

But interestingly there was one small difference for some of the subjects.

Some of the subjects sat down, and

they entered their information in the computer, and other subjects sat down, and

it looked like someone else had already entered some information on the computer.

A prior subject had left their prior responses on the screen.

It said that person had a certain identity, and

it made a number of different choices.

And we picked that identity in particular because we knew that some of the people

would want to avoid looking like that group.

We did this study at Stanford University, and it turns out a lot of Stanford

undergraduates don't wanna look like graduate students.

Graduate students are seen as sort of geeky,

sort of dorky, they go to undergrad parties, and

so undergrad students don't wanna look like those graduate students around them.

So, we wondered what would happen when we told those undergraduates the grad

students had made particular choices, would they pick the same that the graduate

students chose, or would they decide to choose something different instead.

What we found was quite interesting.

For things like bike lights, people tended to do the same thing as others.

But for things like music, people tended to avoid what that group had chosen.

So, what's the important difference?

Well, certain products are more functional,

whereas others are more symbolic.

Certain things like the bike light we use, the backpack we carry or

what type of pen we use is mainly for its functional benefit.

We do those things for

the functional benefits they provide but other things are more symbolic.

Things like music, cars, and

clothes are domains people tend to make inferences about others.

They're much more symbolic for communicating of identity.

And so, what does that mean?

Well, in these more functional means people do the same thing as anyone.

The fact that someone else said they liked to given back light or

liked to given pad of paper, suggests it's pretty good, and we should do the same.

It provides that information we talked about previously.

But in these more symbolic domains, we're gonna care a lot about who is doing it.

Not just the fact that others like it, but who those others are.

If they're like us, or

they're part of a group we want to look like, we're happy to do it.

If the cool kids are doing it, we're gonna do the same thing.

If organizations that are high status are doing it,

our organization might do the same thing.

But if other organizations.

We don't want to be associated with her doing it.

Or other people, we don't want to look like her doing it.

We're gonna avoid doing it.

It's not just the functional value of that product or service.

It's what it communicates out about us to do the same thing.

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