Contagious Why Things Catch On

Triggers.
BUZZING FOR BZZAGENT
No one would mistake Dave Balter for a Madison Avenue shark as portrayed in the popular TV
series 
Mad Men.
He’s young—just forty—and looks even younger, with downy cheeks, wire-rimmed
glasses, and a wide-open grin. He’s also genuinely passionate about marketing. Yes, 
marketing.
To
Dave, marketing isn’t about trying to convince people to purchase things they don’t want or need.
Marketing is about tapping into their genuine enthusiasm for products and services that they find
useful. Or fun. Or beautiful. Marketing is about spreading the love.
Dave started out as a so-called loyalty marketer figuring out ways to reward customers for sticking
with a particular brand. He then created and sold two promotional agencies before founding his
current firm, BzzAgent.
Here’s how BzzAgent works. Say you’re Philips, the maker of the Sonicare electric toothbrush.
Sales are good, but the product is new and most people aren’t aware of what it is or why they would

---

want to buy one. Existing Sonicare customers are beginning to spread the word, but you want to
accelerate things, get more people talking.
That’s where BzzAgent comes in.
Over the years, the company has assembled a network of more than 800,000 BzzAgents, people
who have said that they are interested in learning about and trying new products. Agents span a broad
range of ages, incomes, and occupations. Most are between eighteen and fifty-four years old, are well
educated, and have a reasonable income. Teachers, stay-at-home moms, working professionals,
PhDs, and even CEOs are BzzAgents.
If you wonder what type of person would be a BzzAgent, the answer is 
you.
Agents reflect the U.S.
population at large.
When a new client calls, Dave’s team culls through its large database to find BzzAgents who fit the
desired demographic or psychographic profile. Philips believes its toothbrush will primarily appeal
to busy professionals aged twenty-five to thirty-five from the East Coast? No problem, Dave has
several thousand on call. You’d prefer working moms who care about dental hygiene? He’s got them,
too.
BzzAgent then contacts the appropriate agents in its network and invites them to join a campaign.
Those who agree get a kit in the mail containing information about the product and coupons or a free
trial. Participants in the Sonicare campaign, for example, received a free toothbrush and ten-dollar
mail-in rebates for additional toothbrushes to give to others. Participants in a Taco Bell campaign
received free taco coupons. Because actual tacos are difficult to send in the mail.
Then, over the next few months, BzzAgents file reports describing the conversations they had about
the product. Importantly, BzzAgents are not paid. They’re in it for the chance to get free stuff and
learn about new products before the rest of their friends and families. And they’re never pressured to
say anything other than what they honestly believe, whether they like the product or not.
—————
When people first hear about BzzAgent, some argue that it can’t possibly work. People don’t just
spontaneously mention products in everyday conversations, they protest. It just wouldn’t seem natural.
But what most people don’t realize is that they naturally talk about products, brands, and
organizations all the time. Every day, the average American engages in more than sixteen word-of-
mouth episodes, separate conversations where they say something positive or negative about an
organization, brand, product, or service. We suggest restaurants to coworkers, tell family members
about a great sale, and recommend responsible babysitters to neighbors. American consumers
mention specific brands more than 3 billion times a day. This kind of social talk is almost like
breathing. It’s so basic and frequent that we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
If you want to get a better sense for yourself, try keeping a conversation diary for twenty-four
hours. Carry pen and paper with you and write down all the things you mention over the course of a
day. You’ll be surprised at all the products and ideas you talk about.
Curious about how a BzzCampaign worked, I joined. I’m a big fan of soy milk, so when Silk did a
campaign for almond milk, I had to try it. (After all, how can they get milk from an almond?) I used a
coupon, got the product from the store, and tried it. It was delicious.
Not only was the product good, it was so good I simply 
had
to tell others about it. I mentioned Silk
almond milk to friends who don’t drink regular milk and gave them coupons to try it themselves. Not
because I had to. No one was looking over my shoulder to make sure I talked. I just liked the product
and thought others might as well.

---

And this is exactly why BzzAgent and other word-of-mouth marketing firms are effective. They
don’t force people to say nice things about products they hate. Nor do they entice people to insert
product recommendations artificially into conversations. BzzAgent simply harnesses the fact that
people already talk about and share products and services with others. Give people a product they
enjoy, and they’ll be happy to spread the word.
WHY DO PEOPLE BUZZ ABOUT SOME PRODUCTS MORE THAN OTHERS?
BzzAgent has run hundreds of campaigns for clients as diverse as Ralph Lauren, the March of Dimes,
and Holiday Inn Express. Some campaigns were more successful at generating word of mouth than
others. Why? Did some products or ideas just get lucky? Or were there some underlying principles
driving certain products to get talked about more?
I offered to help find the answer. Enthusiastic at the prospect, Dave gave my colleague Eric
Schwartz and me access to data from the hundreds of campaigns he’d run over the years.
We started by testing an intuitive idea: interesting products get talked about more than boring ones.
Products can be interesting because they’re novel, exciting, or confound expectations in some way. If
interest drives talking, then action flicks and Disney World should be talked about more than
Cheerios and dish soap.
Intuitively this makes sense. As we discussed in the Social Currency chapter, when we talk to
others, we’re not only communicating information; we’re also saying something about ourselves.
When we rave about a new foreign film or express disappointment with the Thai restaurant around the
corner, we’re demonstrating our cultural and culinary knowledge and taste. Since we want others to
think we’re interesting, we search for interesting things to tell them. After all, who’d want to invite
people to a cocktail party if all they talked about was dish soap and breakfast cereal?
Based on this idea, advertisers often try to create surprising or even shocking ads. Dancing
monkeys or ravenous wolves chasing a marching band. Guerrilla and viral marketing campaigns are
built on the same notion: Have people dress in chicken suits and hand out fifty-dollar bills on the
subway. Do something really different or people won’t talk.
But is this actually true? Do things have to be interesting to be discussed?
To find out, we took the hundreds of products that had taken part in BzzCampaigns and asked
people how interesting they found each of them. An automatic shower cleaning device? A service that
preserves newborn babies’ umbilical cords? Both seemed pretty interesting. Mouthwash and trail
mix? Not so interesting.
Then we looked at the relationship between a product’s interest score and how frequently it was
talked about over the ten-week campaign.
But there was none. Interesting products didn’t receive any more word of mouth than boring ones.
Puzzled, we took a step back. Maybe “interest” was the wrong term, potentially too vague or
general a concept? So we asked people to score the products on more concrete dimensions, like how
novel or surprising they were. An electronic toothbrush was seen as more novel than plastic storage
bags; dress shoes designed to be as comfortable as sneakers were seen as more surprising than bath
towels.
But there was still no relationship between novelty or surprise scores and overall word of mouth.
More novel or surprising products didn’t get more buzz.
Maybe it was the people scoring the products. We had first used undergraduate college students, so
we recruited a new set of people, of all ages and backgrounds.

---

Nope. Again the results remained the same. No correlation between levels of interest, novelty, or
surprise and the number of times people talked about the products.
We were truly bewildered. What were we doing wrong?
Nothing, as it turned out. We just weren’t asking the right questions.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IMMEDIATE AND ONGOING WORD OF MOUTH
We had been focused on 
whether
certain aspects matter—specifically, whether more interesting,
novel, or surprising products get talked about more. But as we soon realized, we also should have
been examining 
when
they matter.
Some word of mouth is immediate, while some is ongoing. Imagine you’ve just gotten an e-mail
about a new recycling initiative. Do you talk about it with your coworkers later that day? Mention it
to your spouse that weekend? If so, you’re engaging in