Jonah Berger
New York Times Bestselling Author and Marketing Professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
With great insight, Jonah Berger removes the cloak of invisibility from powerful sources of influence and resolves fascinating mysteries of human behaviour.
Why do some things catch on while others fail? What makes online content viral? And why do some products, ideas, and behaviours get more word of mouth than others? Professor Jonah Berger examines the behavioural science that underlies these questions. He examines how people make decisions, how ideas diffuse, and how social influence shapes behaviour.
Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On and Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behaviour. He has published dozens of articles in top-tier academic journals, and popular accounts of his work frequently appear in popular outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Science, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Wired, Business Week, The Atlantic, and The Economist. His research has also been featured in the New York Times Magazine’s “Year in Ideas.” Berger has been recognized with a number of awards for both scholarship and teaching, including various early career awards and being named Wharton’s Iron Prof (an award for awesome faculty research).
Dr. Berger has helped all sorts of companies and organizations get their stuff to catch on. From Fortune 500 companies to small start-ups, and multinationals to non-profits, Berger has helped drive new product adoption, sharpen effective messaging, and develop marketing strategy.
Books by Jonah Berger
Videos featuring Jonah Berger View All
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Why Things Catch On
Jonah BergerThe key insight behind Contagious is that word of mouth isn’t luck, it’s not chance and it’s not magic. We all know that word of mouth is really effective, but to make it work for us we’ve got to figure out how to get it in the first place.
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Word of Mouth Marketing
Jonah BergerBeing a mall business is very different from being a large business. You don’t have a lot of resources; you don’t have a lot of manpower; you’re really sort of bootstrapped up in and trying to grow where big business' really have a little less mobility than you might otherwise.
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Building Social Currency
Jonah BergerIn the book we have six key steps: research evidence-based principles that people can apply in their everyday life so take one and the first one in the book is social currency: the idea that we don’t just talk about things for any reason we talk about things that make us look good, things that make...
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Sharpening Your Messaging Idea
Jonah BergerI think the key to being remarkable is first understand your idea: what are you selling in the first place? What is that thing? What’s the key aspect of that thing that the consumers or customers might find interesting? And then sharpen that idea.
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Science & The Art of Marketing
Jonah BergerIt’s interesting to think about marketing as an art. And I do agree that there’s a good bit of art to it – some creativity, but there’s also a lot of science.
Articles by Jonah Berger View All
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Why it Pays To Be a Copycat
Jonah BergerWho wouldn’t want to be a bit more influential? Whether trying to nail that big interview, convince a client, or get the neighbor to finally trim their hedges, most people would love to be a bit more persuasive.
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Is Little Data The Next Big Data?
Jonah BergerIs personal quantification the next evolution of the Big Data revolution? And is our addiction to analytics leading us astray? Three weeks ago, at approximately 10:32pm, Nike made me hit my dog in the face.
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Viral's Secret Formula
Jonah BergerWant to know why things go viral? I have a secret for you. It’s not luck. From the Harlem Shake to Rutgers basketball coach abusing his players, hardly a week goes by without some video or news story going viral. And viral has a huge impact on businesses, large and small.
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Crafting Contagious
Jonah BergerEveryone from Fortune 500 companies to the corner coffee shop has realized that word-of-mouth helps things become popular – in fact, it’s up to 30 times more effective than traditional advertising.
Have you seen Jonah Berger speak? What did you think?