Social currency. Just as people use money to buy products or services, they
use social currency to achieve desired positive impressions among their
families, friends, and colleagues.
So to get people talking, companies and organizations need to mint social
currency. 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; and (3)
make people feel like insiders.
INNER REMARKABILITY
Imagine it’s a sweltering day and you and a friend stop by a convenience
store to buy some drinks. You’re tired of soda but you feel like something
with more flavor than just water. Something light and refreshing. As you
scan the drink case, a pink lemonade Snapple catches your eye. Perfect. You
grab it and take it up to the cash register to pay.
Once outside, you twist the top off and take a long drink. Feeling
sufficiently revitalized, you’re about to get in your friend’s car when you
notice something written on the inside of the Snapple cap.
Real Fact # 27: A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber.
Wow. Really?
You’d probably be pretty impressed (after all, who even knew glass could
bounce), but think for a moment about what you’d do next. What would
you do with this newfound tidbit of information? Would you keep it to
yourself or would you tell your friend?
—————
In 2002, Marke Rubenstein, executive VP of Snapple’s ad agency, was
trying to think of new ways to entertain Snapple customers. Snapple was
already known for its quirky TV ads featuring the Snapple Lady, a peppy,
middle-aged woman with a thick New York accent, who read and answered
letters from Snapple fans. She was a real Snapple employee, and the letter
writers ranged from people asking for dating advice to people soliciting
Snapple to host a soiree at a senior citizens home. The ads were pretty
funny, and Snapple was looking for something similarly clever and
eccentric.
During a marketing meeting, someone suggested that the space under the
cap was unused real estate. Snapple had tried putting jokes under the cap
with little success. But the jokes were terrible (“If the #2 pencil is the most
popular, why is it still #2?”), so it was hard to tell if it was the strategy or
the jokes that were failing. Rubenstein and her team wondered whether real
facts might work better. Something “out of the ordinary that [Snapple
drinkers] wouldn’t know and wouldn’t even know they’d want to know.”
So Rubenstein and her team came up with a long list of clever trivia facts
and began putting them under the caps—visible only after customers have
purchased and opened the bottles.
Fact #12, for example, notes that kangaroos can’t walk backward. Fact
#73 says that the average person spends two weeks over his/her lifetime
waiting for traffic lights to change.
These facts are so surprising and entertaining that it’s hard not to want to
share them with someone else. Two weeks waiting for the light to change?
That’s unbelievable! How do they even calculate something like that?
Think of what else we could do with that time! If you’ve ever happened to
drink a Snapple with a friend, you’ll find yourself telling each other which
fact you received—similar to what happens when your family breaks open
fortune cookies after a meal at a Chinese restaurant.
Snapple facts are so infectious that they’ve become embedded in popular
culture. Hundreds of websites chronicle the various facts. Comedians poke
fun at them in their routines. Some of the facts are so unbelievable that
people even debate back and forth whether they are actually correct. (Yes,
the idea that kangaroos can’t walk backward does seem pretty crazy, but it’s
true.)
Did you know that frowning burns more calories than smiling? That an
ant can lift fifty times its own weight? You probably didn’t. But people
share these and similar Snapple facts because they are remarkable. And
talking about remarkable things provides social currency.
—————
Remarkable things are defined as unusual, extraordinary, or worthy of
notice or attention. Something can be remarkable because it is novel,
surprising, extreme, or just plain interesting. But the most important aspect
of remarkable things is that they are worthy of remark. Worthy of mention.
Learning that a ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber is just
so noteworthy that you have to mention it.
Remarkable things provide social currency because they make the people
who talk about them seem, well, more remarkable. Some people like to be
the life of the party, but no one wants to be the death of it. We all want to be
liked. The desire for social approval is a fundamental human motivation. If
we tell someone a cool Snapple fact it makes us seem more engaging. If we
tell someone about a secret bar hidden inside a hot dog restaurant, it makes
us seem cool. Sharing extraordinary, novel, or entertaining stories or ads
makes people seem more extraordinary, novel, and entertaining. It makes
them more fun to talk to, more likely to get asked to lunch, and more likely
to get invited back for a second date.
Not surprisingly, then, remarkable things get brought up more often. In
one study, Wharton professor Raghu Iyengar and I analyzed how much
word of mouth different companies, products, and brands get online. We
examined a huge list of 6,500 products and brands. Everything from big
brands like Wells Fargo and Facebook to small brands like the Village
Squire Restaurants and Jack Link’s. From every industry you can imagine.
Banking and bagel shops to dish soaps and department stores. Then we
asked people to score the remarkability of each product or brand and
analyzed how these perceptions were correlated with how frequently they
were discussed.
The verdict was clear: more remarkable products like Facebook or
Hollywood movies were talked about almost twice as often as less
remarkable brands like Wells Fargo and Tylenol. Other research finds
similar effects. More interesting tweets are shared more, and more
interesting or surprising articles are more likely to make the New York
Times Most E-Mailed list.
Remarkability explains why people share videos of eight-year-old girls
flawlessly reciting rap lyrics and why my aunt forwarded me a story about a
coyote who was hit by a car, got stuck in the bumper for six hundred miles,
and survived. It even explains why doctors talk about some patients more
than others. Every time there is a patient in the ER with an unusual story
(such as someone swallowing a weird foreign object), everyone in the
hospital hears about it. A code pink (baby abduction) makes big news even
if it’s a false alarm, while a code blue (cardiac arrest) goes largely
unmentioned.
Remarkability also shapes how stories evolve over time. A group of
psychologists from the University of Illinois recruited pairs of students for
what seemed like a study of group planning and performance. Students
were told they would get to cook a small meal together and were escorted to
a real working kitchen. In front of them were all the ingredients necessary
to cook a meal. Piles of leafy green vegetables, fresh chicken, and succulent
pink shrimp, all ready to be chopped and thrown into a pan.
But then things got interesting. Hidden among the vegetables and
chicken, the researchers had planted a small—but decidedly creepy—family
of cockroaches. Eww! The students shrieked and recoiled from the food.
After the bedlam subsided, the experimenter said that someone must be
playing a joke on them and quickly canceled the study. But rather than send
people home early, he suggested that they go participate in another study
that was (conveniently) taking place just next door.
They all walked over, but along the way they were quizzed about what
had happened during the aborted experiment. Half were asked by the
experimenter, while the other half were asked by what seemed like another
student (who was actually covertly helping the experimenter).
Depending on whom participants happened to tell the story to, it came
out differently. If they were talking to another student—that is, if they were
trying to impress and entertain rather than simply report the facts—the
cockroaches were larger, more numerous, and the entire experience more
disgusting. The students exaggerated the details to make the story more
remarkable.
We’ve all had similar experiences. How big was the trout we caught last
time we went fishing in Colorado? How many times did the baby wake up
crying during the night?
Often we’re not even trying to exaggerate; we just can’t recall all the
details of the story. Our memories aren’t perfect records of what happened.
They’re more like dinosaur skeletons patched together by archeologists. We
have the main chunks, but some of the pieces are missing, so we fill them in
as best we can. We make an educated guess.
But in the process, stories often become more extreme or entertaining,
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