WORDLE and its meteoric viral journey

Since the last couple of days, all my days have looked pretty much the same. I wait for an entire day, snuggle in bed once the clock strikes 12, only to solve a WORDLE puzzle! The blank grid of 30 squares is the best thing ever!

If you are active on social media, you would have come across posts featuring green, yellow and grey boxes. Yep, that’s WORDLE for you.

For those of you who are still not familiar with the game, WORDLE is a daily crossword puzzle online game that can be played only once a day. You get only 6 chances to guess a 5-letter word for the day, so the stakes are really high! That’s what makes it quite challenging but fun too!

WORDLE was created by Josh Wardle (Wordle is a play on his last name) for him and his partner to play in the pandemic, because they loved word games. It was first shared only with family and friends. The game was made public in October 2021.

Wordle started trending on Twitter in late December 2021, after Wardle added the share feature to the game, that allows the players to share the results with their friends and family in the form of a grid of coloured square emojis. This feature was inspired by a group of friends from New Zealand who started playing the game in late November 2021 and posted their results on Twitter in the emoji format.

It started from merely 90 players in November 2021 and went up to 3,00,000 players by January 2022. A week later, the figure stood at 2 million players. Recently, the New York Times purchased the game from Josh Wardle in an undisclosed 7-figure deal.

The game will continue to run for free for now.

Why has WORDLE gone viral?

Less is more : The game has a minimalistic Interface and and is quite user-friendly & aesthetically pleasing. There are no intrusive ads, no login needed, heck it doesn’t even have an app yet! All you need to do is get on the website and you are ready to play! The website has done a good job on explaining how the game is to be played. The game wasn’t built with the idea of monetising it and this simplicity has connected with the masses.

Drip-feeding : You can only play one game per day, that keeps you hooked and makes you want more!

Focus on the message, not the messenger : While creating anything, you primary focus should be the message or the content. Technologies will come and go, but people will continue to share things the same way. And, people share things that they really connect with. So, focus on the psychological drivers of sharing.

Josh has spent many years at Reddit and has been part of many of its viral projects. He has engaged in game-like community projects that has helped him understand “community engagement” and “online behavioural interaction”. He is very well versed with community engineering – anticipating and altering the way in which users interact with each other in a game. And, this is what has made Wordle so popular today.

Word-of-mouth marketing has a huge impact on sales. McKinsey says that word-of-mouth marketing generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising in categories as diverse as skincare and mobile phones. It is more targeted, you always have a tendency to be friends with people with similar interests. So, any idea or product that interests you might interest someone in your social network.

To understand word-of-mouth marketing better, I watched the Google Talk of Jonah Berger about his book, Contagious : Why Things Catch on, wherein he talks about the 6-steps to word-of-mouth marketing –

Social currency
Triggered
Emotional
Public
Practical value
Stories

To learn about the framework in detail, you can read the book or get some insights by watching the video.

Wordle resonates closely with the principles of social currency, trigger, emotional and public.

Social currency : This speaks of the idea of status by association. People always want to talk about things that make them look good or smart. The things we say affect how people see us. Things like cool information of something makes us look smart and in the know. And, Wordle does just that for you!

Trigger : It’s a cue that encourages us to think about the product. There need to be related cues in the environment to remind us that the product exists. You can either link a product to a time or try to grow your habitat. Think of cues and triggers that makes your consumers come around.

Just as Corona did. When you are on a beach, it is hard not to order the Corona beer. Similarly with the third wave of pandemic hitting the world, we have been spending a lot of time on our phones. And while we dedicate many hours to mindlessly scrolling through our phone, it is a great thing to have a little time dedicated to a brain exercise.

Emotion : Emotion is a big driver in marketing. Emotions are positive or negative, but it also depends on the arousal. Like, happy is a positive emotion, and sadness is a negative emotion. When you are happy, your body feels activated. When you are sad, your body feels deactivated, you want to snuggle in your bed and be by yourself. And, when your body gets going/feels activated, you infer that it is because of the content that you are consuming at the time.

When you play WORDLE, all your brain cells get activated and you feel super charged, even if it is for just a few minutes. And once, you have solved a puzzle, you share it with your friends.

Public : When we see something, we are more likely to imitate it. It has a huge impact on whether the product catches on. With the share button, that was added to Wordle, it makes it top-of-mind. Because top-of-mind is what makes a product tip-of-tongue.

Hook Framework

Wordle’s fame is closely associated with the hook framework by Nir Eyal.

Hook Framework has four steps,

The Action: Wordle has made it extremely simple to access and solve the word puzzle
The Variable Reward: Due to the vastness of English vocabulary and an abundant supply of 5-lettered words, Wordle is able to generate a sense of variety and brings in the element of surprise in all its words.
Investment: The time we put in the game kind of becomes the investment. The desire to maintain our daily streak and to get the word within the available tries keeps bringing us back to the game everyday.
The Trigger: The fact that the puzzle refreshes everyday at 12am triggers in us an urgency to solve the puzzle as soon as possible, before everybody else and in lesser number of tries.

Closing thoughts!

Finally, I would say that, in a world where consumers attention is the most sought after entity, Wordle is proof that even simple things can hold the audiences attention and that you don’t have to spend millions on advertising and marketing.