In conversation with Dr. Jonah Berger, Marketing Professor
Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a world-renowned expert on innovation, word of mouth.
Updated
On this page
Updated November 2026. This was first published on 21 November 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count. This is a record of a conversation from that day. No new quotes were added.
Key takeaways
- Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a world-renowned expert on innovation, word of mouth, change, and why products, ideas, and services catch on.
- He is an internationally bestselling author of The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, and Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior. He has published over 50 articles in top-tier academic journals, teaches Wharton’s highest-rated online course, and popular accounts of his work often appear in places like Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Harvard Business Review.
- He was named one of the American Management Association’s “Top 30 Leaders in Business.” He often delivers keynote lectures at major conferences and events like SXSW and Cannes Lions.
Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a world-renowned expert on innovation, word of mouth, change, and why products, ideas, and services catch on. He is an internationally bestselling author of The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, and Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior. He has published over 50 articles in top-tier academic journals, teaches Wharton’s highest-rated online course, and popular accounts of his work often appear in places like Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Harvard Business Review.
He was named one of the American Management Association’s “Top 30 Leaders in Business.” He often delivers keynote lectures at major conferences and events like SXSW and Cannes Lions. He consults for companies like Apple, Google, Nike, Amazon, GE, 3M, Kaiser Permanente, and The Gates Foundation.
With his latest book, The Catalyst, he provides a powerful way of thinking and a range of techniques to catalyze change, revealing that it’s not about pushing harder or exerting more energy but instead removing barriers and lowering the hurdles to action.
1.****Change is hard, be it within the person, company, or business model. Most of the time, people took the approach of ‘pushing’ multiple times. In your book, Catalyst, you introduced a revolutionary approach to change. You mentioned that there are five key factors/barriers that prevent change. Can you talk about those factors?**Everyone has something that they want to change. Marketers want to change consumers’ minds. salespeople wish to change customers’ and potential customers’ minds; leaders want to transform companies; start-ups want to change industries; non-profits wish to change the world. Often, we push, pressure, or control, yet nothing happens. So, the question is, could there be a better way.
Simply, when we think about change, we think about pushing, adding more pressure, reasons, facts, figures, but that doesn’t work. As I talked about in Catalyst, what we really need to do is identify their barriers to change and mitigate them. If you think about a good analogy, imagine you have parked your car. You get in the car, stick your key in the ignition and put your foot on the gas, and if the car doesn’t go, we think, well, we just need more gas. If people don’t change, we think we just should push them a little bit harder, add more facts, more figures, more reasons, and then they will come along. Going back to the car idea, if the parking brake is engaged, we can step on the gas all we want. What one has to do is, find the parking brakes and remove them, and that’s what the Catalyst is all about.
There are five common barriers that come up repeatedly: Reactants, Endowments, Distance, Uncertainty, and Corroborating Evidence and put them together in a framework, and they spell the word ‘REDUCE,’ which is exactly what a great catalyst does. They don’t push harder; they don’t provide more facts, figures, or reasons. They identify those barriers and reduce them.
2.****As a team leader who is driven to implement a change within the team, one has identified these barriers. What would be the next steps to ease the adoption of change? Also, can you provide some suggestions for upcoming leaders to identify the structural changes?
I think we have to start by understanding the company’s people that we are trying to change. Too often, we do know what we want to change and the outcome we want to achieve. But we know less about the people of the company that we are trying to change. I often work with companies or people and ask, ‘why didn’t someone adopt the change initiative you had in mind’.
They often know about what they want to achieve but not a lot about the people of the company that they are trying to change.
My suggestion to them is: Identify the root, figure out why somebody hasn’t already done what you want them to do, what are the barriers or obstacles that are getting in the way, and how by mitigating those obstacles can you can make change more likely.
3.****In an insightful chapter, you gave an example of how formal interventions can provide addicts with persuasive evidence of their need to change. How important is self-persuasion in accepting or initiating a change?**I often say that “we should not persuade them. encourage them to persuade themselves, not sell them, but get them to buy-in.” But the way to do that is by understanding them. Self-persuasion is key, but we have to guide people. We don’t want to be completely hands-off. because people won’t necessarily change, and we have to encourage them to go down a journey towards changing with us. I think questions are a really powerful tool to do this. Asking people, the right question can encourage them to come to a decision themselves if they want to change without us forcing them. Great questions could be a powerful way to self-persuasion.
4.****You discussed each barrier to change with case studies. You chose broad examples, such as public health campaigns and interpersonal interactions, with particularly illuminating sections on eliminating teen smoking and cultivating mentorship habits within sales teams. Do you believe that the examples of case studies will help your readers identify and mitigate the barriers?
In writing a book like this, one powerful thing I saw was that the same tool seemed to come up again and again. Whether parenting experts are talking about changing kids’ behaviour. whether salespeople are talking about convincing clients. whether leadership gurus are talking about convincing teams; the same tactics come up repeatedly. I think the case studies most certainly would help people identify and mitigate barriers in their own lives.
5.****How can a leader/catalyst start the change-oriented conversation effectively?
I would start this answer with a question for yourself. What are the obstacles/barriers getting in the way? What information do you need to collect to understand them and their challenges better? That’s also why questions could be so great. Rather than assuming we know the answer, ask people for help in figuring out the answer, and it can help us get there.
6.****In an interview, you said that the idea of being a ‘Catalyst’ came to you while you were talking to your friend, who is a chemist. Can you tell us how you thought of relating a chemistry principle to human behaviour?
When we hear the word ‘catalyst’; we often use it socially: someone was a catalyst, or someone is a catalyst for change. But in chemistry, catalyst has a particular meaning. In chemistry, a catalyst is something that creates change. But not just create change; they do it with less energy, not more. Often change requires a lot of energy, temperature, and pressure to create an outcome. A catalyst lowers the barrier to change and identifies a way to make the change happen with less energy. The same thing is true in the social world. Rather than asking what we could do to make someone change, we should ask, ‘why haven’t they changed already’. Identifying those barriers would make change more and more likely.
7.****With change comes the fear of the unknown. What is the best strategy to keep the people engaged and help them overcome the fear of the unknown as a leader driving change in your company?
In the ‘uncertainty’ chapter, I talked about the ‘fear of the unknown’. Not only do the old things feel safe, but new things seem risky. Not only are you attached to old things, but new things are uncertain. If I stick with what I’m doing already, it might not be perfect. at least I know the outcome I will achieve. Whereas, if I do something new, it’s less clear; it might be better or could be worse. I don’t want to do something if it might not be better, so I am lowering the chances of trials. You can read more about it in the uncertainty chapter. But the key is allowing people to experience the value of change themselves rather than it coming from us. Encouraging it to come from within, guiding them and helping them see what we are suggesting is actually valuable for them.
8.****Since the outbreak of the pandemic, most of the work has shifted to virtual platforms. Do you think that persuading team members/ others is more challenging now?
Yes, you know, in some ways, you could argue that change is harder. We are not interacting with team members face-to-face, and so in that sense, sure, change can be harder. But I think change is always hard; it’s not harder because we are not face-to-face. If we don’t understand them, it is going to be difficult. I don’t think it has necessarily gotten worse.
9.****You are a professor, and now you are also working as a consultant with many Fortune 500 companies and other B2B companies. How do you manage to work and find time to write these fantastic books?
I think when these things work, they work all together. So, research helps me with my consultant clients, where I learn exciting new things and given challenging problems, then I try to bring research to solve those problems. It helps me find new techniques to address those problems. The books are really an outpouring of that beneficial cycle, the learnings that I get from working with my clients and research and hoping to help a broader set of people.
Questions and answers #
What is the main point? #
Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a world-renowned expert on innovation, word of mouth, change, and why products, ideas, and services catch on.
What else did the original piece say? #
He is an internationally bestselling author of The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, and Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior. He has published over 50 articles in top-tier academic journals, teaches Wharton’s highest-rated online course, and popular accounts of his work often appear in places like Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Harvard Business Review.