Contagious

In 2004, Howard Wein opened a steakhouse in Philadelphia called Barclay Prime. He'd spent years at Starwood Hotels helping launch the W brand, but now he faced a brutal reality: 25 percent of restaurants fail within their first year, and 60 percent close within three. Barclay Prime needed something to make people talk.

Wein's solution wasn't a massive advertising campaign. It was a $100 cheesesteak.

That's right—a hundred-dollar sandwich. Kobe beef, shaved black truffles, butter-poached Maine lobster tail, served with champagne. In Philadelphia, the city that invented the cheesesteak. The press went wild. Celebrity chefs showed up. People who'd never heard of Barclay Prime were suddenly telling their friends about this absurdly expensive sandwich.

This is the central puzzle of viral success: why do some things catch on while others don't? And more importantly, can we predict it?

Most people assume viral success depends on luck or on special individuals—the influencers, the connectors, the people with huge social media followings. If you can just get the right person to share your product, the thinking goes, it will take off.

This is wrong.

The evidence is clear. Word-of-mouth drives between 20 and 50 percent of all purchasing decisions. It's at least ten times more effective than traditional advertising, because when a friend recommends something, you trust it in a way you never trust an ad. But here's the kicker: only 7 percent of word-of-mouth happens online. The vast majority—93 percent—happens offline, in face-to-face conversations that marketers can't track, can't measure, and can't buy.

So if you can't buy word-of-mouth, and if it's not driven by influencers, what actually makes things catch on?

Let's look at Blendtec. This was a company that made industrial blenders—not exactly a product that screams "viral potential." Their marketing director, George Wright, noticed that CEO Tom Dickson liked to test blenders by dropping wooden boards into them. Wright had an idea: what if they filmed Dickson blending things that people actually cared about?

The result was "Will It Blend?"—a video series showing Dickson pulverizing everything from marbles to iPhones. The videos generated over 300 million views. Retail sales increased by 700 percent. And here's the critical point: Blendtec didn't hire celebrities. They didn't buy expensive ads. They simply figured out what would make people want to share.

This is the fundamental insight: virality isn't born, it's made. Viral success follows predictable patterns based on the characteristics of the message itself, not the status of the messenger. A joke doesn't spread because a famous person tells it—it spreads because the joke itself is worth repeating.

So what are these patterns? Through extensive research, Jonah Berger identified six principles that drive social transmission. He calls it the STEPPS framework: Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories.

Let's pause here for a moment. Think about what we've just established. Word-of-mouth drives up to half of all purchases, but almost all of it happens offline, beyond the reach of traditional marketing. Influencers aren't the answer—the message matters more than the messenger. And there are specific, identifiable principles that make content contagious.

Now, let's see how this applies to the Barclay Prime case. The $100 cheesesteak worked because it created Social Currency—it made people look cool and knowledgeable when they told their friends about it. "You won't believe what I heard about this place..." The outrageous price point was inherently remarkable, something worth talking about. And Philadelphia's strong cultural association with cheesesteaks served as a persistent Trigger, keeping the restaurant top-of-mind whenever anyone thought about the city's signature food.

The Blendtec campaign worked similarly. Watching a blender destroy an iPhone created a high-arousal emotional response—amazement, curiosity, delight. The videos were Public in the sense that people wanted to show others what they'd seen. And the whole thing was wrapped in a Story that made the product central to the narrative.

Here's what this means in practice: if you want something to catch on, don't focus on finding the right messenger. Focus on making the message itself worth sharing. Ask yourself: would people look smart or interesting for telling their friends about this? Does this connect to something people encounter regularly in their environment? Does it generate a strong emotional response? Is it visible enough that people can see others using it? Does it provide genuine practical value? Can it be embedded in a story that people naturally want to tell?

The STEPPS framework gives you a systematic way to answer these questions. Each principle represents a lever you can pull to increase the contagiousness of your product or idea.

But here's the question that should keep you thinking: if 93 percent of word-of-mouth happens offline, in conversations you can't track or measure, how much of your marketing strategy is built on assumptions about online sharing that simply don't match reality? And what might change if you started designing for the conversations people actually have, rather than the ones you can monitor?