Jonah Berger studies trends and popularity | Audio

Listen to Marketing professor Jonah Berger talk about his research.

According to Jonah Berger, the popularity of a child's name depends on his or her parents' environment.

Berger, a Wharton marketing professor since 2007, studies "how products, ideas and behaviors catch on and die out," he said.

His main focus is the social aspect of decision making, with regards to popularity.

He said he tries to understand which social factors or social processes cause things to become popular or die out.

For example, Berger said, many people dress similarly to their friends but not exactly the same. He wants to assess when people dress alike and why.

He also studies what leads people to talk about different subjects and how that might lead certain topics or products to become more popular than others.

He is currently working on a project that uses The New York Times' Web site. He is exploring why certain articles make the most-e-mailed list, while others do not. To do this, he looks at the characteristics and content of the articles to see why they are popular.

Another project he is working on deals with first names.

"I have about 120 years of data on first names," Berger said.

He looks at the popularity of names and how long they remain popular, questioning whether some names are a fad or have some other reason for being prevalent.

He does not factor in the sound of the first name with the last name because his research "suggests that how people feel it sounds might depend on how many other people have [that name] or how quickly it became popular," he said.

College junior Christine Nieves took Berger's class "Consumer Behavior" last fall. She wrote in an e-mail that Berger "has done a formidable job amalgamating social and cognitive psychology principles of consumer behavior with a strong marketing framework and business focus."

As a complement to his research, Berger is teaching a class called "Contagious," which covers popularity. The class discusses why specific items are popular and how fads develop, as well as how social networks affect those fads.

"Jonah is an immense scholar with tremendous potential to be a leader at Wharton," Professor Eric Bradlow, one of Berger's colleagues in the Marketing Department, wrote in an e-mail. "He is an all-star teacher, colleague and an unparalleled researcher within his cohort."

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