Prince Rahul's Key Ideas from Contagious
by Jonah Berger

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; 
3. Make people feel like insiders. 

Sharing extraordinary, novel, or entertaining stories or ads makes people seem more extraordinary, novel, and entertaining.

• Can the product do something no one would have thought possible (such as blend iPhone like Blendtec)?
• Are the consequences of the idea or issue more extreme than people ever could have imagined? 

• Good game mechanics keep people engaged, motivated, and always wanting more. 
• We all enjoy achieving things. Tangible evidence of our progress makes us feel good.
• So discrete markers motivate us to work harder, especially when we get close to achieving them. 
• Game mechanics also motivate us on an inter personal level by encouraging social comparison. 
• People don’t just care about how they are doing, they care about their performance in relation to others. 

• Scarcity and exclusivity help products catch on by making them seem more desirable.
• If something is difficult to obtain, people assume that it must be worth the effort.
• If people get something not everyone else has, it makes them feel special, unique, high status. 
• If something is unavailable or sold out, people often infer that lots of other people must like it, and so it must be pretty good.

• Triggers not only get people talking, they keep them talking.
• Think about whether the message will be triggered by the everyday environments of the target audience. 
• Even a bad review or negative word of mouth can increase sales if it informs or reminds people that the product or idea exists. 
• The more something is triggered, the more it will be top of mind, and the more successful it will become. 
• Top of mind means tip of tongue. 

• Marketing messages tend to focus on information. 
• Rather than harping on features or facts, we need to focus on feelings; the underlying emotions that motivate people to action. 
• More anger or more humor led to more sharing. 
• Emotions drive people to action. They make us laugh, shout, and cry, and they make us talk, share, and buy. 
• But people are less likely to talk about or share things that make them content because contentment decreases arousal. 

• Making something more observable makes it easier to imitate.
• The famous phrase “Monkey see, monkey do” captures more than just the human tendency to imitate.
• If something is built to show, it’s built to grow. 
• Television shows use canned laugh tracks for this reason: people are more likely to laugh when they hear others laughing. 
• Behavior is public and Thoughts are private. 

• Setting a higher reference point made the first deal seem better even though the price was higher overall. 
• By mentioning $100 or $200 as the price you might expect to pay, the infomercial sets a high reference point, making the final price of $39.99 seem like a steal. 
• Deals seem more appealing when they highlight incredible value. 
• Restricting availability through scarcity and exclusivity makes things seem more valuable. 

1. If the product’s price is less than $100, percentage discounts will seem larger.
2. If the product’s price is more than $100, the opposite is true. Numerical discounts will seem larger.

Take a $2,000 laptop. While a 10 percent discount may seem like a relatively small number, it immediately seems much bigger when translated into dollars ($200). 

• People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. 
• Stories save time and hassle and give people the information they need in a way that’s easy to remember. 
• Stories carry things. A lesson or moral. 
• They provide a sort of psychological cover that allows people to talk about a product or idea without seeming like an advertisement.