Focus On: Jonah Berger

Trading Compliments, not Insults

Posted on December 11, 2012

Over the last three and a half weeks, a Facebook page called Penn Compliments has inspired University of Pennsylvania students to post more than 500 compliments about their fellow students, according to a recent article in the Daily Pennsylvanian student newspaper.

The creator of Penn Compliments prefers to remain anonymous — as are those who post compliments on the site — but told the DP that he had seen a similar compliments page at Columbia University in November and decided to start one at Penn. Since September, when the first such page appeared at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, more than 50 schools around the world have adapted the idea to their own campuses, according to the DP.

The goal of Penn Compliments is to “learn to do good and spread good,” the Penn Compliments founder told the student newspaper. Penn “can be a pretty high-stress, competitive environment, at times even negative.”

Can such a high-minded initiative last at a time where one is more likely to see Facebook posts with snarky insults and innuendos rather than uplifting, affirmative praise?

“This can definitely work,” states Maurice Schweitzer, Wharton professor of operations and information management and an expert on trust and emotions in business. “There are real benefits from positive thinking, and self-confidence can be boosted in many ways. This site is unlikely to be popular with everyone, but there are some people who will gain a positive boost episodically and others who may become ‘regulars.’”

The premise behind Tesser’s Self Evaluation Maintenance model — which assumes that people behave in a way that maintains or increases self-evaluation and that people’s relationships with others have a substantial impact on self-evaluation — is that people seek to maintain a positive self-image, Schweitzer says. “The self-image is easily threatened — by, for example, negative feedback on a project — but can be maintained by seeking positive feedback in a different domain.”

 Schweitzer predicts that the Penn Compliments site will have staying power. “I believe there are some people who will derive significant benefits from this. For these people, a positive boost at the right time could make the difference between success and failure. For example, it could be that someone teetering on the edge between staying in a program or dropping out could be tipped to stay because of this.”

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger — who studies social contagion, social influence and viral marketing, among other topics — applauds the site for its positive nature. “It’s contagious because it’s self-propagating,” he told the DP. “Getting a compliment informs people about the site and encourages them to pass it on and compliment others.”

A Time.com article two weeks ago featured the four original founders of the compliment site at Queen’s University, who say that their Facebook account now has more than 4,000 friends and 1,300 compliments. Posts on the site have called the student founders “the human equivalent of a ray of sunshine” and “the inspiration for Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect.’” The founders themselves, according to Time.com, say they want to contribute to anti-bullying crusades and increased awareness of mental health issues, especially following several student deaths — both suicides and accidents — in 2010 and 2011.

Of course, even something as benign as complimenting others comes with a few rough edges and quirks. The Penn site’s founder has commented on his need to delete foul language and inappropriate political comments from some of the compliments. But he didn’t delete one especially popular compliment directed toward a long-standing syndicate firmly embedded in the Penn community — squirrels.

The compliment reads: “UPenn squirrels, don’t ever change. You guys are so fat and furry, always with an oversized piece of food/garbage in your cheeky little cheeks…. I love all you guys.”

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Chick-fil-A and the Boy Scouts: Branding at Risk?

Posted on July 27, 2012

Uproar is growing over controversial stands on gay rights taken recently by leaders of the Boy Scouts of America and the Chick-fil-A restaurant chain. But Wharton experts predict that the outcry ultimately won’t cause a significant amount of damage to either organization’s brand image.

Earlier this month, the Boy Scouts reaffirmed a policy banning openly gay members and gay men or lesbians serving as leaders. Chick-fil-A president Dan T. Cathy spoke in support of the traditional definition of marriage in an interview with a Christian news organization.

In both cases, the organizations were either lauded or castigated depending on where people stood on the issue. Some Eagle Scouts returned their medals in protest in response to the Boy Scouts’ move. Cathy, the son of the chain’s founder, has been praised for his stand by politicians Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.

Meanwhile, a recipe for a homemade version of the chain’s signature sandwich has been making the rounds on the Internet amid calls for a boycott, and Muppets creator The Jim Henson Co. decided to end a partnership to distribute the entertainment company’s toys at the chain. (Chick-fil-A says it voluntarily recalled the toys.) The mayors of Boston and Chicago have also expressed disapproval of Cathy’s comments.

Gay rights supporters have planned a national “Same-Sex Kiss Day” at Chick-fil-A locations on August 3, while Huckabee has called for a “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” on August 1. “The Chick-fil-A story is picking up momentum, but these things usually fizzle,” Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed says. While social media and the speed at which news travels these days serve to amplify consumer concerns about such issues, Reed says there are three major factors working against critics of Chick-fil-A and the Boy Scouts.

First of all, consumer attention spans tend to be short. “The 24-hour news cycle will put another story top-of-mind, and these kinds of things are quickly forgotten unless the transgression is so reprehensible — think Penn State — that it truly engenders a large consensual ‘moral outrage,’” Reed notes.

In addition, consumers tend to rationalize decisions in order to continue believing what they want to believe or doing what they want to do, he says. And finally, such events are often more a reason for people to reaffirm their values (i.e., the Muppets or Huckabee) than to actually change their minds.

That said, Reed notes that it was “not smart” of Cathy to make such comments. “There is nothing to be gained from making a statement that could be construed as, ‘We don’t want gay people buying our chicken,’” he says. “Cathy should have made it clear that he is expressing his own views. Note that Chick-fil-A and its brand DNA are run with ‘values’ in mind — [for example,] the fact that they choose to forego sales on Sundays, presumably because it is a day of worship.”

He adds that a statement posted on the chain’s Facebook page, which states that Chick-fil-A’s culture is to “treat everyone with honor, dignity and respect — regardless of their belief, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender,” came off as “inconsistent.”

Reed also points out that if either the Boy Scouts or Cathy decided to reverse their stance in the future, it would be “very tricky” to sell that to consumers. “Once you put a statement out there, it’s out there,” he says. “In my opinion, backing off the statement is a mistake. The better approach would be to try to explain what was meant by it.”

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger notes that, given all strong opinions about gay marriage and gay rights, “it is unlikely that a policy reversal will have an immediate impact. Customers will want to see consistent behavior over time before they start to change their minds.” He adds that while Chick-Fil-A is a privately owned company, “the Boy Scouts are seen as more of a national organization, so it may be harder for them to stick to a narrow-minded, politically-driven position.”

The smartest approach for businesses, Reed says, “is to simply not weigh in on cultural matters at all unless your brand or company exists in a domain or product category in which that value is essential to the definition of the product category itself. There are too many other pressing business concerns to deal with than risk the reputation of the company on things like this.”

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Burger King: Seducing Customers with Bacon

Posted on July 5, 2012

Burger King received lots of buzz last month when it launched its new summer menu, including an unexpected treat: a bacon sundae.

Yes, that’s soft-serve vanilla ice cream topped with hot fudge, caramel and crumbled bacon. And to emphasize the bacon part, the whole thing is served with a bacon-slice garnish.

Initially, some thought the company must be joking. “I wasn’t sure if this was for real,” says Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn. “In the past, [Burger King] would do outrageous things just to get media and social attention. The famous ones were the ‘Whopper Freak Out‘ — where they removed the Whopper [hamburger] from the menu and filmed customers freaking out when they ordered one and were told there were no more left — and the ‘Whopper Virgins,’ where Burger King went to remote places [around the globe] where people had never had hamburgers and had them taste test the Whopper. Another famous [ploy was giving] away cologne that was called ‘Blaze’ and smelled like a hamburger. The whole point of these [campaigns] was to get attention. So my first thought was that this is another attention-getting idea — and that may be part of it.”

But gimmick or not, a sundae has to taste good in order to sell. Lee Stapleton, program director at Sensory Spectrum, a New Providence, N.J.-based consulting firm that works with food manufacturers on product evaluation, says that the combination is not that far-fetched. “As a taste experience, the smoky-meaty note of the bacon and its saltiness play nicely with the chocolate and caramel on the vanilla ice cream — a working man’s salted caramel brownie.” 

Kahn agrees that Burger King is essentially “giving the people what they want…. Lots of people like bacon — and little bits of it on ice cream might make for a tasty treat. It’s not making the food healthier, though, that’s for sure!”

Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and author of the blog Food Politics, is not surprised that the company would introduce a menu item that seems to defy all reasonable dietary guidelines. (The sundae clocks in at 510 calories with 18 grams of fat — more fat than the chain’s bacon cheeseburger.) “Burger King likes to position itself as envelope pushing — bigger, more caloric and more outrageous,” she says. ”It’s hard to believe that this will be a big best seller, but it’s doing what it’s supposed to do: getting press attention.”

Whether that attention is good or bad, the product will generate word-of-mouth, says Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger. ”People love to talk about surprising, novel or interesting things, and ice cream and bacon are a perfectly unexpected combination.” He adds that “controversy can also increase word-of-mouth. Too much controversy … may turn people off, but a bacon sundae is just weird enough to spark a healthy debate. Some people will love it, most people will hate it, and the difference of opinion will generate discussion.”

What’s more, Berger notes that bacon has valuable cachet among a coveted demographic. “It’s an ingredient that stands out…. And it doesn’t hurt that men love it.” Stapleton also points out that aside from its novelty, the dessert has “guy appeal.” And Nestle says that the company’s bacon sundae campaign is “a marketing strategy that works with BK’s core customer base — young men.”

Perhaps Burger King is on to something by exploiting the seemingly powerful allure of bacon among younger males. On the June 2012 cover of the U.S. edition of Men’s Health magazine, one of the headlines reads: “Seduce Her with Bacon.” No joke.

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Gibson Strums a Twitter Chord to Empower Small Business

Posted on September 14, 2011

Gibson Guitar, the maker of the iconic Les Paul and Firebird guitars, is using social media to build support from around the world as it battles the U.S. government over allegations of illegal wood imports. A Twitter campaign launched by Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz (hash tag “#ThisWillNotStand”) has rallied thousands of Gibson Guitar fans, with nearly 4,400 tweets at last count. Wharton experts say Gibson may be tapping into social media’s true power, regardless of the outcome of the allegations.

 On August 24, armed agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service raided two Gibson manufacturing facilities in Tennessee along with the company’s Nashville, Tenn., headquarters, and confiscated $1 million worth of rare Indian ebony, finished guitars and electronic data. The federal agency hasn’t yet filed any charges, but the Justice Department alleges the wood was imported illegally from India, which bans the export of most types of unfinished wood. The Lacey Act of 1900 requires American companies to observe the laws of foreign countries in the trade of animal products, plants and wood, among items. Gibson faced similar trouble in 2009, when federal agents raided the company and seized wood they say was illegally imported from Madagascar. The Justice Department last June sued Gibson in the Madagascar case. Juszkiewicz maintains Gibson is innocent in both cases and just today posted an online petition urging the President to resolve the inquiry against it and “make the Lacey Act fair.”

Meanwhile, Juszkiewicz’s current Twitter pitch has David vs. Goliath undertones. “Each step in the democratization of access to these communications tools has been empowering to some — typically the less powerful — and threatening to others, typically those who hold the traditional reins of power,” says Kendall Whitehouse, Wharton director of new media. Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger describes social media as “a new engine for social movements,” citing its role in the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere. “It allows people to garner support for issues where public participation may not be safe until enough of a movement has formed,” he says. “It also allows companies and groups to build momentum and advocacy quickly and effectively, even over vast geographic distances.”

 The rise of instantaneous, global communications has changed much of the way the world works, Whitehouse notes. “In particular, the lowering of the barriers of access to these tools is having a profound effect — not only on government and small businesses, but on everything from political movements to major corporations.”

Social media is only the most recent link in a long chain that extends back to at least the rise of the Internet, Whitehouse adds. “The students during the uprising in Tiananmen Square got much of their message out — and learned of the reaction of the world — through fax machines. It’s the communication of the message rather than the mechanism that’s important. Social media further allows people and enterprises to connect and collaborate online.”

Gibson may have enlarged its fan base with its Twitter campaign, but its reputation has not been spotless. In 2009, Gibson was voted the “worst place to work” by its own employees, according to a Reuters report, which cited an analysis by jobs website Glassdoor.com. How successfully Gibson can defend itself in court, if and when federal charges are filed, is also an open question. It isn’t clear if this is the first time a company has used social media to fight a legal case. “But I agree it could lead to under-informed supporters backing a cause that ends up to have no merit,” says Berger. “As with many situations, consumers may be showing their advocacy even if they don’t have the right information.”

In an unwitting twist, Juszkiewicz’s campaign has also become a platform for Tea Party enthusiasts targeting President Barack Obama over unemployment. Accusing “big government [of] spending our money to harm ordinary citizens and small businesses,” Juszkiewicz has warned that if the raids lead to the closure of Gibson’s Tennessee factories, 700 jobs would be lost. At Obama’s jobs address last Thursday, Juszkiewicz was the special guest of Marsha Blackburn, Republican congresswoman from Tennessee. Says Andy Meek in The Daily Beast: “The invite was a definite nose-thumbing at the President, whose administration inadvertently helped turn Gibson … into a rabble-rousing battle cry for the Tea Party and conservative media establishment.”

Others point to some bizarre situations that could result from the Lacey Act, such as requiring guitar owners to prove their instrument was not made out of illegal wood. As The Economist writes in its September 3 edition: “Guitarists now worry that every time they cross a state border with their instrument, they will have to carry sheaves of documents proving that every part of it was legally sourced.”

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Target’s Missoni Line Is a ‘Crashing’ Success

Posted on September 13, 2011

Target’s latest collaboration with a high-end designer — in this case, Italian fashion house Missoni — got off to a strong start today.

Maybe a little too strong. Demand was so high for clothing, shoes and other goods adorned with Missoni’s trademark zigzags (but not its usual high price tags) that it brought down all of Target.com. Missoni items became available this morning and by 9 a.m., the Minneapolis-based retailer’s website was on the fritz. Meanwhile, fashionistas were also inundating retail stores, cleaning out many locations in just a few hours.

The site has been working intermittently throughout the afternoon, but many items are now out of stock. For example, fans of the ballet flats adorned with multicolored zigzags will have to look elsewhere — possibly eBay, where the shoes, which Target priced at $29.99, are selling for $129.99. That’s still a steal, however, compared to a pair from Missoni’s upscale line: A flat similar to the Target pair is selling on Amazon.com for $435.

While Target has spent much of the day apologizing to customers, and still has to face the consequences of its technical difficulties, the excitement generated by the Missoni collection is exactly the reaction retailers are trying for when launching a celebrity brand.

“Retailers are in a difficult situation right now because the price of cotton is going up, as are labor and operating costs,” Wharton marketing professor and director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center Barbara Kahn noted in a recent Knowledge@Wharton story about the upsides and pitfalls of celebrity collaborations. “But with private labels, they have many more pricing options and much more control over their brands.  Attach a celebrity name to an exclusive store brand, and retailers get all that dazzle and panache along with all the profits. It’s a way to create excitement in the store and make it special.”

In addition, consumers like brands with a “name” attached, Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger told K@W. “They feel better about wearing them and they feel better about giving them as gifts. This is why name brands are more resistant to a downturn.”

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The Name of the Game is Shame

Posted on March 30, 2011

Brazil plans to push the government bureaucracy overseeing $11.6 billion in construction projects for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic games into meeting building deadlines by regularly publishing project progress – or lack thereof — in an effort to manage by naming and shaming.

The idea is that the threat of embarrassment or shame will prod all players to ratchet-up efforts and meet the goals. Worries have been growing that construction schedules for the two big events were falling behind. The Financial Times reported that Pele, Brazil’s retired celebrity soccer player, said Brazil could embarrass itself and not be ready for the games if it did not push new stadium construction and rehabbing to move faster. Most projects have fallen behind schedule and some construction has not yet even begun.

So the thinking is to shift any blame and embarrassment from the national level down to those in the bureaucracy actually responsible for meeting goals, with the aim of averting disaster.

Does the name-and-shame management technique work? Usually, yes, says Jonah Berger, a Wharton marketing professor. It can be very effective in improving general accountability and making people more likely to achieve goals, he says. “If it is easy to hide and say, ‘I’ll get it done next year,’ and if no one is looking, it won’t matter. But if the schedule is made public, you are more likely to get it done on time.”

Similar principles apply to governments, companies and individuals. “If you want to lose 10 pounds and you don’t tell a friend, then you are less likely to reach your goal. If you tell a friend and don’t reach your goal, the friend can always say, ‘you didn’t do what you said you were going to do.’”

Such peer pressure works because “we care about how we look to others and how others will see our behavior. That encourages us to do the right thing.”

Brazil is not the first to use a name-and-shame approach. In the U.K. just last month defense secretary Liam Fox said he would name and shame defense companies that look likely to miss contracted delivery dates.

“Where projects are falling behind schedule or budget, the MoD (Ministry of Defence) personnel responsible will be brought to account in front of the project board,” Fox told the Financial Times. That’s shaming staff. But he also plans to publish a list of “projects of concern” every quarter that will name and shame companies running programs that fall behind schedule or where costs start to run higher than budgeted.

“Why would companies want to keep information about potentially failing contracts from their own shareholders?” Fox said. Why indeed!

Greece, meantime, recently suffered criticism from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, which claimed the country was avoiding implementing a name-and-shame program that could embarrass prominent tax evaders into paying up. The Greek government finally adopted the practice. The measure was part of a larger effort, including tougher jail sentences for those convicted of tax evasion, to increase the rate of tax collection.

And last year, India announced it would create a public database of its worst environmental polluters, an approach similar to that adopted by China in 2009, in yet another finger-wagging effort to assign shame and blame.

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Why ‘Friday’ Just Won’t Go Away

Posted on March 24, 2011

It seems like everyone is laughing at Rebecca Black. But her universally mocked viral music video has become a business success story — and that’s no joke.

The 13-year-old has garnered millions of YouTube hits, thousands of  iTunes downloads and become a constant Twitter trending topic thanks to “Friday,” a song almost universally considered to be pretty awful. Her single even hit number 72 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, sandwiched between the kids from Glee and country star Kenny Chesney.

What makes this song so bad it’s good? Is it the prodigious use of AutoTune? Or Black’s intense lyrical debate about whether to sit in the front or back seat of her friend’s car? What about the equally confounding video — why is she waiting for the school bus if her friends are giving her a ride?

“Friday” has all the classic attributes of an “earworm” — also known as a song that gets stuck in your head, according to James Kellaris, a marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati who studies the influence of music on consumers. The lyrics are relatively simple, there’s a lot of repetition and “some odd incongruities, features that violate listeners’ expectations.

“There is also something social going on here that has relatively little to do with the music itself,” Kellaris continues. “When a crowd of onlookers stops to watch something, others will stop to see what is going on. If the crowd increases, it exudes sort of a gravitational pull. This seems to be happening on YouTube, with millions of viewers checking out what all the fuss is about.”

Even if that attention is focused on how bad the song is, the broad level of public awareness is what’s really important here. Recent research co-authored by Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger found that negative publicity can actually make a positive impact on sales by giving previously unknown products a share of the spotlight. In investigating how book sales were affected by poor reviews, Berger and his co-authors discovered that, as time passes, customers “may not remember that something is negative. You may read a negative review today, and then a couple of weeks go by, and you might remember that you heard something about the book, but not remember exactly what you heard.” In those cases, the poor review becomes “free advertising,” boosting awareness with few repercussions.

So far, the “Friday” video has more than 42 million views on YouTube. About 63,000 listeners took advantage of the site’s “like button” to give it the digital thumbs-up. But a comparatively whopping 543,461 clicked the “dislike” button.

An erroneous Internet report sparked rumors that Black was making hundreds of thousands of dollars from YouTube views and sales of her song. She’s not doing quite that well — Billboard’s Glenn Peoples did the math and estimates that she’s making closer to $25,000 per week from track sales. But that’s not bad for a single most people claim (at least publicly) to hate. (Black told Jay Leno that she’s donating the proceeds from the music video to earthquake/tsunami relief efforts in Japan and to her school.)

“Consumers may purchase ['Friday'] precisely because the song is bad,” says Wharton marketing professor Deborah Small.  ”A bad performance can be funny, and people experience schadenfreude, or pleasure from the pain … of others. This particular video … appeals to teenagers, who can relate to the characters in the video.”

They can also relate to Black. “Although [teens] may aspire to be rock stars, they can envision themselves at [Black's] level of stardom,” Small notes. “This is similar to the [reasons for] the success of much of reality TV.”

It remains to be seen if Black capitalizes on her 15 minutes of fame to become the next Justin Bieber — or if she’s destined to languish in one-hit wonder territory. But she might take note of a cautionary tale from a recent Knowledge@Wharton story about the rise and fall of fads, which warns of the challenges in keeping consumer eyes from wandering. Hot streaks, according to Wharton operations and information management professor Marshall Fisher, “are like an airplane. If it stops operating at a certain speed, it falls like a stone.”

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