Triggers

What it is

The founding evidence is Jonah Berger and Eric Schwartz in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2011. They analysed a dataset of everyday conversations covering more than 300 products, ran a large field experiment across several cities, and ran a controlled laboratory experiment using real conversations rather than reported intentions.

Two findings, and the second is the one that matters. More interesting products received more immediate word of mouth, which everybody expected. Those same products received no more ongoing word of mouth over the following months, and no more overall. The authors flag that as contrary to intuition.

What did predict sustained talking was being cued more often by the environment, or being more publicly visible. Not more interesting. More encountered.

The mechanism is accessibility rather than persuasion. A product sitting next to something that happens often in a person's week gets re-thought often, and a product that is merely remarkable gets thought about once.

In effect

Commercially this inverts the usual brief. The remarkable thing is what a creative team is rewarded for and what a client will approve, and it buys a spike. Attaching a product to an existing routine is harder, duller and buys the rest.

It also creates a measurement trap that follows from the finding rather than from any assumption about industry practice. The two effects have different time courses, so a measurement window short enough to catch only the first rates the two strategies as equivalent. Separating them requires months. Whoever chooses the window is therefore choosing which strategy is allowed to win.

Nir Eyal names the same machinery from the designer's side in Hooked, calling them external triggers: information placed in the environment telling a user what to do next. Eyal is describing how to build one deliberately. Berger and Schwartz are reporting what happens when one exists.

What it does not say

It does not say that remarkability is worthless. It buys immediate word of mouth and that was measured, not dismissed.

It does not say anything about buying. The outcome throughout is word of mouth, and a cued product being mentioned more often for longer is a claim about mentions.

It does not transfer automatically from speaking to posting. The 2011 data is conversation. A post is permanent, addressed to an audience you cannot see, and subject to a platform's ranking. As far as we can find, nobody has re-run this design on posting, which is a strange gap given how much now depends on the answer.

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