How does marketing work in an era where things go viral on the Internet and social media dominates our national discourse? Jonah Berger, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, has an understanding of how it can work and a philosophy of how you can use it to promote your work. Using terms like “social currency” and established concepts like social status, he describes how online marketing can work in a way that is inexpensive but effective. He does so in a manner that outperforms perhaps any other author on the subject.
Berger attempts to provide a coherent and comprehensive theoretical treatment. He defines several essential and mutually exclusive qualities of communication that might effectively communicate with potential customers. In the last chapter, he brings these qualities together to show why certain online communications work or didn’t work. He provides illustrations from history (or more accurately, builds his theory from historical examples). These stories not only convey his point; they also provide a context and a story that persuades the reader that he knows what he’s talking about.
This work will certainly appeal to marketers and to communicators, but it can also appeal to people (like me) who are interested in how the computer and the Internet are transforming the way we live. This book could not have been written in the early 1990s, but is essentially a foundation of marketing theory today. Berger teaches us that theory should not lag behind practice too much. He gives us a first draft of what that theory might look like. In so doing, he teaches us how we can draw a good audience for the work that is our lives.
Contagious: Why Things Catch On
by Jonah Berger
Copyright (c) 2013
ISBN13 9781451686579
Audiobook
Genre: Business, Marketing
www.amazon.com