4.8 • 641 Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2023
⏱️ 54 minutes
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When we understand how that language works, we communicate more effectively and in doing so increases our success.
Jonah Berger is doing profoundly interesting work. He's a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and he explores and discusses the science of behavior and how language can be used to influence it.
He's the international best-selling author of Contagious, Invisible Influence, and The Catalyst. Jonah explains how everything we do involves language, from emails and presentations to how we communicate with our friends.
Jonah is leading in his field with over seventy papers published in top-tier academic journals, and his work is often featured in publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review. He's been named one of Fast Company's most creative people in business and now has a new book "Magic Words: What to Say to Get Your Way".
In today's conversation, he reveals how changing a few words can change a person's life. His concept of "magic words'' is something that can have a big impact on our success.
Highlights from our conversation:
Enjoy!
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0:00.0 | marketing is seen as a four-letter word, right, a bad thing. Influence is seen as a bad thing. |
0:05.8 | No one wants to be influenced. But if we use these type of tools to get people to make better |
0:11.4 | choices, to feel better about themselves, to eat healthier, to exercise more, to do a variety |
0:16.4 | of good things, we wouldn't say that's negative, right? We would say that that's good, right? We're |
0:20.9 | moving them in the right direction. It's only when these tools are used to encourage people to buy |
0:25.7 | something they don't need or make bad decisions, then we see influences as a negative thing. |
0:31.3 | And so to me, you know, influence marketing, behavioral science in general is neither good |
0:36.7 | nor bad. It's kind of agnostic. It's a tool. |
0:40.2 | That was Jonah Berger. Now, Jonah is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of |
0:48.3 | Pennsylvania. He's also a very well-known author, author of other books called Contagious, Invisible Influence, The Catalyst. |
0:56.3 | And today we are talking about language in his most recent book called Magic Words. |
1:03.2 | Now, before you go, wait a minute, what do I care about language? |
1:05.9 | I'm not a linguist, but you are. |
1:09.0 | And you've heard me say many times on the show that the words you say to yourself are the most important words in the world. |
1:15.8 | But if you, I wouldn't even leave it there, right? |
1:18.0 | If you are interested in things like confidence, if you are interested in things like your identity, who are you at your core agency, the agency that you have in the |
1:29.4 | world, your ability to do what you wish, how you wish. These are fundamentally, it turns out, |
1:38.5 | especially in our culture, since we're social animals, are grounded in our ability to choose |
1:43.5 | words wisely. |
1:44.6 | And this is why, among other things, this conversation is absolutely fascinating. |
1:49.4 | Take confidence, for example, do you want to be more confident? |
1:52.9 | Yes, it turns out that choosing the words that that signal confidence, whether you're |
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