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Jonah Berger
Assistant Professor of Marketing

What makes ideas viral and products spread contagiously? Professor Jonah Berger studies social epidemics, or how products, ideas, and behaviors catch on and become popular as well as die out and become abandoned. He examines how individual decision making and social dynamics (e.g., social influence) between people generate collective outcomes such as social contagion and trends.

Most recently, Professor Berger’s research examined how consumers’ desire to communicate, or signal, certain identities to others influences when people abandon products. In other recent research, he examined how subtle cues in everyday environments influence consumer decision making and the success of products and ideas.

His research has been published in top-tier academic journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Popular accounts of his research have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Science, Sloan Management Review, and The Economist.

Professor Berger’s teaching interests include Consumer Behavior and Contagious: How Products, Behaviors, and Ideas Catch On. He holds a PhD in Marketing from Stanford and a BA with distinction in Human Judgment and Decision Making from Stanford.

Current Research Papers

Jonah Berger, Katy Milkman, (2009), "Social Transmission and Viral Culture"

Jonah Berger, Alan T. Sorensen, Scott J. Rasmussen, (2009), "Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: Can Negative Reviews Increase Sales?"

Andrew Stephen, Jonah Berger, (2009), "Creating Contagious: How Social Networks and Item Characteristics Combine to Spur Ongoing Consumption and Drive Social Epidemics"

Jonah Berger, Devin Pope (2009), "Can Losing Lead to Winning?"

Jonah Berger, Morgan Ward, (2008), "Subtle Signals of Inconspicuous Consumption"

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Publications

Jonah Berger, Gael Le Mens, (2009), "How Adoption Speed Affects the Abandonment of Cultural Tastes", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Aner Sela, Jonah Berger, Wendy Liu, (2009), "Variety, Vice, and Virtue: How Assortment Size Influences Option Choice", Journal of Consumer Research

Jonah Berger, Chip Heath, (2008), "Who Drives Divergence? Identity-Signaling, Outgroup Dissimilarity, and the Abandonment of Cultural Tastes", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(3), 593-607

Jonah Berger, Lindsay Rand, (2008), "Shifting Signals to Help Health: Using Identity-Signaling to Reduce Risky Health Behaviors", Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (2), 509-518.

Jonah Berger, Marc Meredith, S. Christian Wheeler, (2008), "Contextual Priming: Where People Vote Affects How They Vote", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (26), 8846-8849

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In The News

Why We Love — and Love to Hate — Fads, Wall Street Journal, 08/10/2009

Don't Blog or Tweet Anything With More Than Half a Million Hits, Wired Magazine, 07/15/2009

Berlin Bans Brakeless Bikes, Freakonomics Blog, 07/02/2009

American Apparel suit means cheap ads, NPR - Marketplace, 05/18/2009

Quick Arriving Fads Quick to Flame Out, New York Times, 05/17/2009

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Knowledge@Wharton

The Long-term Downside of Overnight Success (08/05/2009)

Advertising Yourself: Building a Personal Brand through Social Networks (04/15/2009)

Is This Madness? How Losing by Just a Little Can Help a Team -- or Company -- Win (03/18/2009)

Getting Engaged: Advertisers Search for Their Voices on YouTube (04/02/2008)

Pumas, Planets and Pens: How Cues in the Environment Influence Consumer Choice (03/27/2008)

'Dead-tree Medium' No Longer: For Many Marketers, Print Outperforms Digital (03/19/2008)

Marketing Presidential Candidates on the Web Goes Mainstream: But Does It Get Votes? (01/09/2008)

Social Marketing: How Companies Are Generating Value from Customer Input (12/12/2007)

The Holiday Shopping Outlook: I Saw Mommy Dissing Santa Claus (11/14/2007)

Move Over, Beanie Babies, Webkinz Are Coming to a Store -- and Virtual World -- Near You (09/19/2007)

Jonah Berger
700 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
3730 Walnut Street University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia , PA 19104-6304
Phone: (215) 898-8249
Fax: (215) 898-2534
jberger@wharton.upenn.edu

Research Interests: Social Influence; Social Contagion; Word of Mouth; Diffusion; Viral Marketing; Product Adoption and Abandonment; Identity, Consumer Decision Making

Last Modified September 18, 2009