stepps-diagnostic

STEPPS Communication Power Diagnostic Framework

R — Original Text (Reading)

After analyzing tens of thousands of contagious messages, products, and ideas, we noticed that six common principles were at work in their contagiousness, forming the deep-seated reasons they spread widely. We broke down these principles that prompt the public to talk about, share, and imitate into six key stages, abbreviated in English as STEPPS: Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, Stories. The premium Barclay's beef sandwich that Barclay's championed possesses these six principles.

— Jonah Berger, Preface "The Six Principles of Contagiousness"

I — Methodological Skeleton (Interpretation)

STEPPS is a six-dimensional communication power diagnostic checklist. Any product, content, or campaign can be checked one by one for its "shareability" across six dimensions:

Social Currency: Does sharing this make me look cooler, smarter, or higher status?
Triggers: In daily life, is there anything that frequently reminds people of this product?
Emotion: Can this content make people's hearts beat faster (awe, anger, excitement, worry, humor)?
Public: Can others see me using this product? Can they imitate me?
Practical Value: Can this information help others? Save time, save money, solve problems?
Stories: Is this information packaged in a narrative people are willing to retell? Is the brand deeply embedded in the plot?

Diagnostic logic: score each dimension one by one, find the weakest dimension, and prioritize strengthening the weak spot. The six dimensions can stack—the more complete the dimensions, the stronger the communication power. The most critical counterintuitive insight: communication power depends on the design of the information itself, not on who the communicator is.

A1 — Applications in the Book (Past Application)

Case 1: Barclay's $100 beef sandwich (a comprehensive case with all six STEPPS dimensions)

Problem: Howard Wein opened a high-end steakhouse in Philadelphia and needed to make the new restaurant quickly famous, but had a limited budget and could not run large-scale advertising.
Use of the methodology: Use the six STEPPS dimensions to analyze the communication design—Social Currency (the $100 sandwich itself is a conversation piece, making people appear well-informed), Triggers (the Philadelphia beef sandwich is a local everyday food, activated at high frequency), Emotion (the $100 price triggers awe and surprise), Public (after winning awards it became a Philadelphia food landmark), Practical Value (information about a top-tier dining experience), Stories (the story of creating a sandwich with luxurious ingredients is itself worth retelling).
Conclusion: When a product satisfies all six dimensions at once, it can achieve large-scale word-of-mouth spread without an advertising budget. Wein "did not invent a new sandwich, but merely recreated a gimmick that everyone rushed to hype."
Result: Barclays has won every food award in Philadelphia, was rated best food by the Discovery Channel, and business keeps booming.

Case 2: Disneyland vs. Cheerios (A comparative case for diagnosing传播 weaknesses)

Question: Why doesn't an interesting product (Disney) necessarily generate more sustained word of mouth than a boring product (Cheerios)?
Use of the methodology: Diagnose with STEPPS—Disney scores very high on social currency (interesting) and emotion (excitement), but is extremely weak on triggers (people rarely go to Disney, and there is no daily reminder). Cheerios is weak on social currency but extremely strong on triggers (eaten every day at breakfast).
Conclusion: The STEPPS diagnosis reveals the counterintuitive conclusion that "interesting does not equal sustained sharing." The absence of the triggers dimension is the fundamental reason Disney's sustained word of mouth is inferior to Cheerios'.
Result: It proves the necessity of diagnosing each dimension separately—you cannot ignore other dimensions just because some dimensions are strong.

A2 — Trigger Scenario (Future Trigger) ★

In what situations would a user need this skill?

The user is planning a marketing campaign or product launch and wants to assess "whether this plan can spread on its own"—they need to diagnose传播 potential one by one using the six STEPPS dimensions.
The user's content/product is "clearly good but no one shares it," and they need to find where the传播 bottleneck is—use STEPPS to identify the weakest dimension.
The user is doing a competitive analysis and wants to understand "why the competitor went viral and we didn't"—use STEPPS to compare the six-dimension differences between both sides.
The user needs a structured checklist to guide creativity when designing a传播 strategy—use STEPPS as a checklist to fill in item by item.
The user needs to explain to a team or client why a传播 plan is effective/ineffective—use the six STEPPS dimensions to provide structured analytical language.

Language signals (activate when these appear in the user's words)

"Can this content/event/product go viral?"
"Why is no one sharing my content?"
"How do I design a传播 strategy?"
"Does this marketing plan have传播 power?"
"Help me evaluate the传播 potential of this event"
"Why is the competitor more viral than us?"

Distinction from adjacent skills

Difference from social-currency : stepps-diagnostic is a global six-dimension framework used to diagnose overall传播 power; social-currency focuses only on the "social currency" dimension within STEPPS, going deep into three minting methods.
Difference from wom-diagnosis : stepps-diagnostic diagnoses "whether the content itself has传播 attributes"; wom-diagnosis diagnoses "whether word of mouth is temporary or sustained"—focusing on decay patterns along the time dimension.
Difference from trigger-evaluation : the triggers dimension of stepps-diagnostic only roughly checks "whether there are daily triggers"; trigger-evaluation goes deep into quantitative assessment across the three dimensions of frequency-intensity-context.

E — Executable Steps (Execution)

After the skill is activated, the agent should execute the following steps:

Collect basic information about the传播 object
- Completion criteria: The object to be diagnosed (product/content/event), target audience, and传播 goal (temporary viral spike or sustained word of mouth) are clearly defined.
Score each of the six STEPPS dimensions one by one
- Completion criteria: Give a 1-5 rating and a one-sentence reason for each dimension. All six dimensions' ratings and reasons are fully written. If a dimension is completely absent (0 points), mark it as a "key weakness".
- Stopping condition: If the subject clearly only needs temporary word of mouth (such as a one-off event), the weight of the trigger dimension can be lowered.
Output a diagnostic report and reinforcement recommendations
- Completion criteria: List the 1-2 lowest-scoring dimensions and give specific reinforcement plans (not empty talk like "strengthen trigger design", but actionable suggestions like "bind the product to the daily coffee-drinking scenario"). Mark the 1 strongest dimension and suggest whether it can be further amplified.

B — Boundary ★

Do not use this skill in the following situations

Pure advertising placement strategy (ROI calculation, media buying, bid optimization) — this is an advertising technology issue, not a communication design issue.
Content creation techniques (copywriting methods, video editing) — STEPPS diagnoses "communication attributes" rather than "creation quality".
Brand positioning or market segmentation — this is a strategic-level issue, while STEPPS is a tactical-level diagnostic tool.

Failure modes the author warns about in the book

The "find the right people" fallacy (ce-002): Attributing communication failure to "not finding the KOL" rather than to the message itself lacking STEPPS attributes. Berger explicitly points out: "This traditional view is wrong... it focuses more on the message's promoters and does not consider enough the root of what can be shared — the message itself."
The luck fallacy (ce-017): Believing that "viral spread is unpredictable and all depends on luck", thereby not doing STEPPS diagnosis and giving up on systematic design.

The author's blind spots / limitations of the era

The STEPPS framework is retrospective induction and suffers from survivorship bias — it extracts principles from successful cases but does not systematically test whether failed cases also conform to these principles. The framework may be a necessary condition but is far from a sufficient condition.
"Considering STEPPS can achieve a 70% success rate" is a powerful marketing claim, but the book does not provide rigorous experimental data to support this precise number.
The weighting relationships among the six principles are not discussed — are the dimensions of differing importance in different scenarios? The book does not answer this.
All cases come from the U.S. market (2010-2012). Social currency and triggers are highly dependent on cultural context, so cross-cultural applicability is questionable.

Adjacent methodologies that are easily confused

"The Tipping Point" theory (Gladwell): Focuses on "who the spreaders are" (the law of the few), while STEPPS focuses on "what attributes the message itself has" — the two are fundamentally opposed frameworks.
"Growth hacking" methodology: Focuses on funnel optimization and A/B testing, while STEPPS focuses on designing the communication attributes of content — the former is quantitative optimization, the latter is creative diagnosis.

Related skills (to be filled in Phase 3)

depends-on: none (this is a top-level framework)
contrasts-with: wom-diagnosis(time-dimension diagnosis vs attribute-dimension diagnosis)
composes-with: social-currency, trigger-habitat, trigger-evaluation(each dimension has a dedicated skill for deeper exploration)

Audit information

Verification passed: V1 ✓ / V2 ✓ / V3 ✓
Test pass rate: To be tested (see test-prompts.json for details)
Distillation time: 2026-05-03