Word-of-Mouth & Virality Framework

A framework for engineering word-of-mouth and making products, ideas, and content contagious, based on Jonah Berger's research into why things catch on. Use it to design shareability into products, campaigns, and content instead of hoping for luck.

Core Principle

Virality is not born — it is engineered. Products spread because they were designed — consciously or not — to be shared. Only 7% of word-of-mouth happens online; the other 93% happens in offline conversations, so virality is about the psychology of sharing, not social media mechanics. Those psychological patterns are predictable and can be engineered into anything using the STEPPS framework.

See: references/word-of-mouth.md when the brief over-indexes on social media — it makes the offline-vs-online case, lists conversation triggers, and gives a WOM measurement/audit method.

Scoring

Goal: 10/10. Score each of the six STEPPS drivers (the six Quick Diagnostic rows) — 0 absent, 1 present but weak, 2 strong and deliberate — for a raw 0-12, then map: 11-12 -> 10, 9-10 -> 8-9, 6-8 -> 6-7, 3-5 -> 4-5, 0-2 -> <=3. Bands:

• 9-10 — three or more drivers at strength 2, at least one of them Public or Social Currency (the self-propagating ones), and the brand survives the Trojan Horse test.
• 6-8 — two drivers genuinely strong, but spread still leans on paid reach or product quality alone.
• <=5 — at most one weak driver; sharing is incidental, not engineered.

Report the raw count, the mapped score, and the specific driver(s) to raise next to reach 10/10.

STEPPS Overview

Not a checklist — a multiplier. Each principle independently increases sharing; the most contagious ideas activate several at once, but even one or two done well dramatically increase word-of-mouth.

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