The Science of VIRALITY | I Gave a Wharton Professor $1,000 To Make Boring Products Go Viral!.mp4

**Unknown speaker (opening quote)** (0:00)
To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world.
And we're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us.

**Thinkschool** (0:14)
People, if I give you a bottle of water, a packet of chips and a boring looking pen, how would you make these products go viral? You cannot hire a celebrity, you are not a social media star and you only have $1000. Well, this is a million dollar question that every brand today is struggling to answer. Because today, in this hyper competitive market, every brand has funding, every brand has a celebrity and every brand has access to the same Amazon, Blink-It and Zepto like platforms. That is why 90% of brands today die because their marketing expense ends up destroying their profits. Which is why, in today's episode, we have the legendary Jonah Berger.

**Jonah Berger** (0:52)
Jonah Berger. Jonah Berger. Jonah Berger.

**Thinkschool** (0:54)
He's a Wharton professor and the author of a best selling book called Contagious. In this episode, he decodes the science behind viral marketing campaigns, the psychology behind virality, and most importantly, he teaches us step by step on how to use the Contagious framework to make boring products like a pen, a packet of chips, and a bottle of water go viral.

**Jonah Berger** (1:14)
This company Blendtec hires a new marketing guy, and he walks into the office and he notices a pile of sawdust on the floor. And his colleague goes, well, the CEO is doing what he tries to do every day, which is break blenders. So the marketing guy sees this, he goes, this is genius, buys a sort of white lab coat for a CEO, puts a pair of goggles, videotapes the CEO, puts it online, the rest is history. This particular video has, I think, 20 million views. Blender sales go up over 700%. They did it for a $50 marketing budget.

**Thinkschool** (1:39)
How do you then sustain that hype for a long time?

**Jonah Berger** (1:41)
The problem with things that go viral is...

**Thinkschool** (1:48)
Before we move on, if you're a marketeer, Odu has something very special for you. As a marketeer, you already know how email marketing can help you build a million dollar business.
But most tools are terrible because they are either complicated or they do not connect well with the Indian ecosystem. This is exactly where Odu Email Marketing and Help Yacht. With Odu, you can create professional looking emails in minutes using simple drag and drop blocks and ready made templates. You need no designers, no coders and no complicated setup. Once your campaign is ready, you can target the right people with precision and segment your audience by location, behavior, customer type, lead stage or purchase history so that every message reaches the people most likely to take action. And because every email is responsive, your campaigns look clean and professional across mobile, tablet and desktop. And what really stood out to me is the analytics. You can track open rates, clicks, engagements, revenue all in real time. You can also see which links are getting the most attention, understand what is driving conversions and use detailed ROI insights to make every future campaign sharper than the last. On top of that, you can even run A-B tests across different creatives, subject lines and audience segments so that you're not doing guesswork. So instead of wasting your time in managing emails, you get to spend more time into generating sales and doing your business. And the best part is you can get started with Odoo email marketing app for free today. And as your business scales, you can access the full suite for just 580 rupees per user per month. So if you want to get rid of the hassles of email marketing and grow your business aggressively, click the link in the description and get started with Odoo today. Jonah, thank you so much for making it to the podcast. It's been a long journey, but we finally made it.

**Jonah Berger** (3:26)
I'm so glad to meet you. It's great to be here.

**Thinkschool** (3:28)
Jonah, you spent a decade understanding something that brands spend millions of dollars to figure out, and that is how to generate word of mouth scientifically and calculatively. And you delivered a lecture at Wharton on the exact same thing, which is how do you make your products go viral, which is why the agenda for today's podcast is to give you a challenge. How can we make seemingly simple, boring products go viral? So today, I've got a bottle of water, the most boring product in the world, a packet of chips that I have no idea about, and a pen.