marketing-contagious

name

marketing-contagious

description

Use when designing or reviewing word-of-mouth, referral, sharing, PR, campaign, product-launch, social-sharing, or behavior-spread strategy using Jonah Berger's STEPPS framework from Contagious. Helps make products, ideas, messages, and campaigns more likely to be talked about, shared, remembered, and passed along. Do not use as a substitute for customer-message clarity; use marketing-storybrand first when the offer itself is unclear. Prefer the marketing hub when the marketing path is unclear; use this skill only for its specific framework.

Marketing / Contagious

Skill for making products, ideas, campaigns, and messages more shareable.

Source attribution

Source: Jonah Berger, Contagious: Why Things Catch On (2013, Simon & Schuster).

This skill distills Berger's STEPPS framework into reusable agent guidance. Do not quote the book or reproduce its examples at length.

When to invoke this skill

• Designing a campaign, product hook, referral loop, launch angle, PR story, social-sharing mechanic, or word-of-mouth strategy.
• Auditing whether a message gives people a reason to talk about it.
• Turning a useful but boring product, feature, or behavior into something more spreadable.
• Checking whether viral attention will benefit the brand, not just the content.
• Creating share prompts, referral copy, user-generated-content prompts, or earned-media angles.

If the user asks "why would anyone share this?" or "how do we make this catch on?", invoke this skill.

Core premise

People share for their own reasons. They share to look good, help others, react to emotion, participate in visible behavior, respond to reminders, and tell stories.

Do not start by finding "influencers." Start by improving the message, product, or behavior so ordinary people have a reason to pass it on.

STEPPS audit

Evaluate the idea against Berger's six STEPPS:

1. Social currency. Does sharing this make someone look smart, useful, entertaining, connected, early, tasteful, or in the know?
2. Triggers. What frequent cue will remind people of this later? Can the message connect to a common situation, phrase, calendar moment, object, habit, or environment?
3. Emotion. What high-arousal emotion does this create? Awe, surprise, amusement, anger, anxiety, excitement, or inspiration spread better than flat satisfaction.
4. Public. Can others see the behavior, choice, badge, artifact, or result? Build to show, not just to use.
5. Practical value. Is there clear useful value people can pass on to help someone else save time, money, risk, effort, or confusion?
6. Stories. Is the product, idea, or benefit embedded in a narrative people would actually retell?

The goal is not to force all six. Strengthen the ingredients that fit the asset.

Valuable virality rule

Virality is only useful when the brand, product, behavior, or core benefit is integral to the story.

Before recommending a stunt, hook, or story, ask:

• Could someone retell this without mentioning the product or idea?
• Would the most memorable detail point back to the desired belief or behavior?
• Does the story prove the benefit, or merely attract attention?

If the brand can be removed and the story still works, the virality is probably not valuable.

Action workflow

1. Define the thing that should spread: product, idea, behavior, offer, story, campaign, or content.
2. Define the desired transmission: talk, share, imitate, refer, try, review, invite, or buy.
3. Run the STEPPS audit.
4. Pick the two or three strongest STEPPS opportunities.
5. Rewrite the message or campaign mechanic around those opportunities.
6. Check valuable virality: the product or desired idea must be essential to the story.
7. Produce concrete assets: hooks, referral prompts, social captions, product moments, public artifacts, or story angles.

Tactics by STEPPS

Social currency

• Find the "inner remarkability": surprising, extreme, counterintuitive, rare, or unusually specific facts.
• Give people insider access, early knowledge, status markers, or smart language to repeat.
• Make sharing feel like a service to the sharer's identity, not unpaid promotion for the brand.

Triggers

• Attach the idea to frequent moments, not rare ones.
• Prefer cues already in the customer's environment.
• Design for ongoing word of mouth, not just launch-week buzz.

Emotion

• Focus on what people feel, not only what the product does.
• Prefer high-arousal emotions when the goal is sharing.
• Avoid emotional manipulation that creates attention without trust.

Public

• Make private use visible through badges, artifacts, rituals, public progress, distinctive design, or observable outcomes.
• Create "behavioral residue" that remains after the action.
• Make imitation easy.

Practical value

• Package useful knowledge so it is easy to pass along.
• Make savings, shortcuts, warnings, or improvements concrete.
• Translate expertise into "news you can use."

Stories

• Wrap the message in a narrative with a clear setup, tension, and payoff.
• Remove story details that do not carry the product or idea.
• Make the desired takeaway impossible to omit.

Red flags

• The idea depends on a celebrity or influencer rather than shareable message design.
• The content is funny, cute, or shocking but unrelated to the product.
• The campaign creates immediate buzz but no recurring trigger.
• The user benefit is useful but hard to retell.
• The story spreads, but the brand or idea drops out.
• The CTA asks people to share without giving them social currency or practical value.

Output format

When creating or reviewing a contagious campaign, return:

## STEPPS diagnosis
- Social currency:
- Triggers:
- Emotion:
- Public:
- Practical value:
- Stories:

## Strongest spread drivers

## Valuable virality check
- Must-retell product/idea detail:
- Risk of brand dropping out:

## Recommended campaign/message

## Concrete assets
- Hook:
- Share prompt:
- Referral/word-of-mouth mechanic:
- Public artifact or trigger: