STEPPS Audit Checklist: The Complete Six-Factor Assessment for Predicting Whether Your Content Will Spread

The Framework

The STEPPS Audit Checklist from Jonah Berger's Contagious provides the complete diagnostic for evaluating any product, idea, or piece of content against all six sharing drivers simultaneously. STEPPS — Social Currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, Stories — are the six factors that determine whether something spreads organically. The audit checklist scores each factor and identifies the weakest link that's suppressing viral potential.

The Six-Factor Audit

S — Social Currency (Does sharing make the sharer look good?). Score: Does talking about this product make the person seem interesting, knowledgeable, or in-the-know? Inner Remarkability, Game Mechanics, and Insider Knowledge are the three sub-mechanisms. If none are present, sharing provides no Social Currency and the first sharing driver is inactive. Fix: add a remarkable element, create status markers, or provide exclusive information.

T — Triggers (Is the product linked to frequent environmental cues?). Score: What in the target audience's daily environment reminds them of this product? If the product isn't linked to a high-frequency trigger, it will be remembered intermittently rather than consistently. Fix: identify a daily activity in the audience's life and create a strong, exclusive association. Berger's Effective Trigger Design Checklist provides the criteria: frequent, proximate, exclusive, habitat-matched.

E — Emotion (Does the content activate high-arousal feelings?). Score: Does this produce awe, excitement, anger, or anxiety (high-arousal = sharing) or sadness, contentment (low-arousal = no sharing)? Berger's Arousal-Sharing Matrix predicts sharing behavior from emotional arousal level. Fix: redesign the content's emotional arc to reach a high-arousal peak.

P — Public (Is usage/adoption visible to others?). Score: Can other people see that someone is using this product or engaging with this idea? Private behavior doesn't spread. Public behavior creates social proof that attracts new adoption. Fix: make the private public — visible branding, shareable badges, public display of membership. Cialdini's social proof from Influence amplifies: visible adoption IS the social proof signal.

P — Practical Value (Is it genuinely useful?). Score: Would someone share this specifically because it helps others? Content with clear practical application ('Save $500 by doing X') spreads through the Practical Value channel because sharing useful information is a gift that earns the sharer gratitude. Fix: package the value in a specific, quantifiable, immediately actionable format. Hormozi's Results in Advance from $100M Leads IS Practical Value delivered before the sale.

S — Stories (Is the brand embedded in a narrative people want to tell?). Score: Is there a story here that people would retell in conversation? And is the brand inseparable from that story? The Trojan Horse principle: the story is the vehicle that carries the brand. If the brand can be removed without changing the story, the story will spread but the brand won't benefit. Fix: embed the brand in the story's resolution so that retelling the story requires mentioning the brand.

Cross-Library Connections

Hormozi's Grand Slam Offer from $100M Offers scores high on multiple STEPPS simultaneously: Social Currency (the offer's remarkability makes sharing it impressive), Practical Value (the value stack is genuinely useful), and Stories (customer transformation narratives carry the brand). The Grand Slam Offer IS a multi-STEPPS product designed to spread organically.

Cialdini's Seven Levers from Influence map to individual STEPPS factors: authority → Social Currency, commitment → Triggers (consistency maintains the trigger link), liking → Emotion, social proof → Public, reciprocity → Practical Value, scarcity → Social Currency (exclusive access), unity → Stories (shared identity narratives).

Hughes's Two-Phase Activation Process from The Ellipsis Manual provides the interpersonal version: Phase 1 activates the emotional state (STEPPS: Emotion) and Phase 2 delivers the action (STEPPS: Practical Value), with the operator's personal story serving as the narrative vehicle (STEPPS: Stories).

Dib's Content Unit from Lean Marketing (Hook → Retain → Reward) aligns with the STEPPS audit: the Hook leverages Social Currency and Emotion, Retain leverages Stories and Triggers, and Reward leverages Practical Value. Content that scores high on all three Content Unit stages also scores high on multiple STEPPS factors.

Implementation

Score each factor 1-5 for your product, campaign, or content piece. Any factor below 3 is a potential sharing bottleneck.

Fix the lowest-scoring factor first. A product with 5/5 on five factors and 1/5 on one factor won't spread because the weak factor breaks the chain.

Don't try to maximize all six simultaneously. Most successful viral products score very high on 2-3 factors and adequate on the rest. Focus on making 2-3 factors exceptional rather than all six average.

Re-audit quarterly because factor strengths change: triggers lose exclusivity as competitors adopt similar associations, remarkability fades as novelty wears off, and practical value shifts as the audience's needs evolve.

Use the audit as a content creation tool. Before creating any piece of content, decide which 2-3 STEPPS factors it will leverage and design the content to score maximum on those factors.

📚 From Contagious by Jonah Berger — Get the book