Wharton marketing professor and author of Contagious — the leading researcher on why content and products get shared.

Berger's six drivers of sharing — Social currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical value, Stories.

What did Berger find about viral emotion?

High-arousal emotions — awe, anger, excitement — drive sharing. Low-arousal ones like sadness suppress it.

Growth Marketing Glossary

Jonah Berger

/ˈdʒoʊnə ˈbəɹɡəɹ/proper noun

Why did THAT go viral? Berger answered with data — six drivers, one acronym, no luck required.

Portrait mark — Jonah Berger

Name: Jonah Berger
Post: Professor, Wharton School
Key work: Contagious (2013)
Framework: STEPPS

Forms & parts of speech

STEPPS · acronym

His six sharing drivers.

"Run the idea through STEPPS before you call it shareable."

Who he is, in plain terms

Jonah Berger is the Wharton marketing professor who asked why some products, ideas, and stories spread while better-funded ones die quietly — then answered with a decade of experiments and analysis of thousands of viral items. Contagious: Why Things Catch On (2013) packaged the findings; Invisible Influence (2016) and Magic Words (2023) extended them.

The key ideas

STEPPS — Social currency (sharing makes us look good), Triggers (top of mind means tip of tongue), Emotion (high-arousal feelings drive sharing, awe and anger more than sadness), Public (visible behavior gets copied), Practical value (useful things get passed on), and Stories (information travels inside narratives). His research on the New York Times most-emailed list showed awe-inducing and anger-inducing content shared most — arousal, not positivity, is the engine.

Why he still matters

Most "make it go viral" briefs are wishes; STEPPS is a checklist that converts the wish into design choices — what trigger ties the product to daily life, what makes the customer look smart for sharing, what story carries the fact. The Blendtec "Will It Blend?" and $100 cheesesteak cases he popularized remain the cleanest teaching examples of engineered word of mouth.

Worked example. A fintech app's referral program stalls at a 2% invite rate. The Berger pass redesigns it on STEPPS — the invite now shows the sender's savings streak (social currency), fires after each payday deposit (trigger), and frames the bonus as found money with a one-line story users retell verbatim. Invite rate triples without raising the incentive a dollar — the share got easier to want, not richer.

Failure modes to watch. Chasing virality with no trigger tying the product to daily life; optimizing for low-arousal contentment instead of awe or surprise; and buying shares with incentives while ignoring whether sharing makes the customer look good.

Synonyms & antonyms

Synonyms

Jonah BergerBergerSTEPPS

Origin & history

Stanford PhD (2007) under Chip Heath, whose Made to Stick seeded the research lineage; joined Wharton the same year. Contagious (2013) grew from his Journal of Marketing Research papers on the New York Times most-emailed list and word-of-mouth drivers.

Etymology: source.

Usage trends

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Common questions

Who is Jonah Berger?: Wharton marketing professor and author of Contagious — the leading researcher on why content and products get shared.
What is STEPPS?: Berger's six drivers of sharing — Social currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical value, Stories.
What did Berger find about viral emotion?: High-arousal emotions — awe, anger, excitement — drive sharing. Low-arousal ones like sadness suppress it.

Related tools & calculators

toolExperiment planner
toolFunnel drop-off analyzer

Resources & people to follow

bookContagious — Why Things Catch On — Jonah Berger
bookMagic Words — Jonah Berger
referenceJonahBerger.com — research page

Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.

Related training

moduleContent marketing

Disciplines

Areas of marketing where jonah berger is a core concern:

Content strategyBrand strategy

Sources

trendsGoogle Trends — "jonah berger"