Since I’ve been reading about marketing and branding, I figured I’d read one more book that is also in my TBR list. Hit Makers is a look at how and why things go viral or become hits. Unlike the other two books, it’s not billed as a guide on how to brand yourself or why you should be a leader – instead, it’s an examination about how things spread.

Hit Makers is divided into two sections: section one is called “Popularity and the Mind” and section two is called “Popularity and the Market”. Personally, I would divide the book into following sections.

The first section is about the first three chapters and it introduces the concept of MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable). This is the theory that people like things that are familiar yet new. They don’t want the same old, but they don’t want something completely foreign either. Ideas and products that succeed are those that combine novelty with familiarity.

The second section will be the next two chapters and it examines the idea of stories. One chapter looks at intertextuality and suggests that all stories draw on the stories before them (not a completely surprising idea if you’ve studied literature), and the other looks at the power of stories. A good story is something that we want to believe in and because of it, it holds tremendous power over us. We don’t want to question a nice story, but sometimes we must.

Chapter 6 rounds up the first part and it looks at fashion and the thin line between liking and hating something because it’s popular, rounding up the discussion of why people like certain ideas.

The second part of the book looks at how things become viral. We tend to think that things go viral, but the book makes an argument that it’s more about a few very influential people sharing messages to their very large audience rather than many people sharing it to their small circle of friends.

The last section is called “what the people want” and it looks at the economics of prophecy (with a fascinating look at how the cannon of Impressionist art came to be) and the history of the news and its need to want to be read.

Overall, this was a fascinating book and my favourite of the three. It’s not a marketing book in the “do this do that” sort of way, but it does provide some food for thought. The book suggests that if anyone or any brand wants to get recognition, the fastest way to do so would be to first have an idea or product that is a twist on what is currently offered, and then get extremely influential people to talk about it to their audience. Whether that’s possible to the average company is another matter altogether.