Imagine attending a cocktail party where you don’t know anyone. You engage in small talk, selecting topics strategically — mentioning books to appear intelligent, restaurants to seem cultured, or amusing anecdotes to be perceived as funny.

Advertisers want to be interesting too⌗

Companies invest heavily in making products stand out through creative advertising — dancing food characters, sedans in car chases, and high-budget campaigns. While this approach can work, a product doesn’t have to seem interesting for a campaign to be effective.

Correlating impact advertising with effectiveness⌗

Wharton professor Jonah Berger studied whether interesting product positioning correlates with campaign success. Working with word-of-mouth marketing firms, he measured consumer engagement across hundreds of products. His findings: he found no correlation. Interesting products didn’t receive any more word of mouth than everyday products.

Novelty showed the same result — no correlation with word-of-mouth engagement, regardless of demographic differences.

Context in advertising⌗

Berger discovered two distinct campaign styles: “impact” advertising, which emphasizes unique qualities, and trigger-based campaigns, which associate products with specific contexts like activities or circumstances.

Context is everything⌗

Research demonstrates context’s powerful influence on behavior:

  • Music genre affecting wine sales in stores
  • Increased space-themed product sales during Mars missions
  • Vote location (schools) influencing education initiative support

Marketing to context⌗

Trigger campaigns build associations between emotional contexts and products over time. Three successful examples:

  • Corona linked beach relaxation to beer (8% market share growth)
  • Kit Kat connected coffee breaks to chocolate bars (5% growth)
  • Kodak created the “Kodak moment” for family gatherings

Three things that matter most for triggers⌗

Frequency: Triggers must occur regularly. Michelob’s holiday campaign underperformed until reframed as “Weekends were made for Michelob.”

Strength: Ubiquitous or competing triggers dilute effectiveness.

Context: Triggers aligned with desired behavior outperform mismatched associations. A pediatrician’s office better suits immunization promotions than grocery carts.

For deeper research insights, explore Jonah Berger’s book Contagious: Why Things Catch On.