In 2008, Jack McKelvey wasn't able to complete $1,000 sale of his glass faucets and fittings because he couldn't accept credit cards. He saw a problem out there in need of a solution. He was an engineer by training, so he worked with a friend with his named Jack Dorsey and they created a payment device. It wasn't anything special, just a little bit of technology, put together here and there. But eventually they went through a number of iterations, and today they put something together what we know as Square. It hooked to phones, it allows payment processing, and recently it process over $100 million in a single day. The device went from nothing to very popular extremely quickly. We can also think of other examples that are like this but a little different. In 2012 and 2013, two students at Boston College were diagnosed with ALS. It's known as Lou Gehrig's disease and it's a motor neuron disease involving the death of neurons, stiff muscles, muscle twitching, and gradually worsening weakness due to muscle wasting, difficulty speaking, swallowing, and eventually breathing. These students were interested in drawing attention of the cause, the disorder. They started to challenge where they had people dump cold water on their head and their head of friends to raise money. They videotaped this water dumping, posted on social media, and they challenged others do it. Soon it caught on the traditional media, it caught on among the golf community, and more and more people began doing it. Eventually celebrities like LeBron James, Bill Gates, and Justin Bieber were taking part, and soon millions of people had raised over $125 million for ALS. Now, these are two examples that seem on the surface quite different. One is a product and one is an action, shooting a video. One is a for-profit and one is a non-profit. They seem quite different on the surface, but might they be actually more similar than they seem? Why do some products, services, and ideas catch on while others fail? How by understanding the secret science can we add our own products and messages to be more successful? When we think about things catching on, we see it around us in the world all the time. There are products like Greek yogurt or Kale, services like Uber or Square, apps like Snapchat, ideas like democracy, behaviors like quitting smoking or voting, catchphrases, fashion styles, and the likes. We can think about these items as culture or cultural tastes. A number of years ago, a scientist wrote a book called The Selfish Gene, where he called these ideas memes. Just like genes compete for people, genes evolve over time based on us, memes are cultural units that compete in the world around us. They evolve over time, competing to see what's going to be more or less successful. When we think about social epidemics or things catching on, well, what does that really mean? It's a case where a product, an idea, or a behavior diffuses through a population. We can almost think it like spreading a virus, starting with a small set of people and moving to infect a broader set. This thing catches on or is contagious at its core. You might wonder, well, why does some things become contagious and others are less successful? Is it the case that better things always win out? You might think, well, better technology or better ideas should be more successful. Sometimes they are. New television technology comes along, it's lighter and larger, maybe we'll go out and buy something new. A better keyboard comes along, or a better way to engage in a payment, we're more likely to do it. But it's not always clear what better is and it's not always clear that better things win. In many cases, worse things win out. The qwerty keyboard that we all use on a day-to-day basis is actually a less functional keyboard than the one that could have been with more alphanumeric going from A, B, and C, it caught on early on and it stayed that way. We can think about Bing versus Google. Many people say Bing at its core is actually a better search engine, yet Google has become much more popular and been more successful. One question is why? If it's not quality, and if it's not advertising, and it's not always price, what leads some things to be more successful? If we think about it, YouTube videos one catches on, one fails, but they may not differ in price, or take names, for example, names like Olivia versus Avery. One of those names is much more popular than another yet there's no difference in price, one isn't more expensive, and there's no advertising campaign to get Olivia versus Avery to become popular, yet ones become more popular than the other. Why? Its core, what's important is to understand the social dynamics that lead things to catch on. Sure price, advertising, and other things matter, but what also matters is the behavioral science. What causes people to remember some ideas more than others? Why do people share things rather than others? Why do people imitate one another? How do social networks cause information to spread and ideas to diffuse? We'll talk about these four key ideas in this course. We'll talk about what makes some things stick in memory, why do people look to one decision and not others, why does one person influence us and other people lead us to avoid what they're doing, when do people share word of mouth about one product or idea rather than another, and how social networks spread the share of information and influence. We'll talk about each of these key four ideas and talk about how together they combine to get products, ideas, and services to catch on. Importantly, beyond these, there's one more factor that's important to think about, which is the likelihood of adoption, a likelihood of a trial. Why don't we try some things rather than others? Often there's a barrier that makes it difficult. We don't have enough knowledge, or time, or money to try everything that's out there. Often companies try to get things to us to make them easier to try. If you go to a grocery store, for example, you're walking down aisle 3 and there's a sample of a food product, there are lowering the barrier to trial to make it easier for people to try that particular product. Sure, you might've bought it by yourself, but by lowering the barrier to trial, by giving you a sample, they've made it easier. Similarly with XM Radio, very popular today, but it wasn't always originally popular. Originally you had a barrier to entry of a cost when you started. It was $300 to buy a yearly service, you had to buy the radar to put in your car, to buy the device, and because of that, people didn't jump to it right away. Well, eventually they lower that initial price. They put them for free for six months in a car, they allowed you to try it in a hotel and by lowering that barrier to trial, they increased adoption. Beyond thinking about social influence and why things stick, we need to think about how to lower the barrier to trial to get things to catch on.
