What is social currency in marketing?
What social currency means, the three levers Jonah Berger names for earning it, and what studies of posting and word of mouth say about sharing for image.
Answer to the question
What is social currency in marketing?
Social currency in marketing is the standing people gain by sharing things that make them look good. Jonah Berger lists it first among the six drivers of sharing in Contagious, and research on posting and word of mouth finds that image, as well as enjoyment, helps explain why people share.
Key takeaways
- Jonah Berger's review of word-of-mouth research sorts conversation into five functions, one of which is impression management, and argues that these motives mostly serve the speaker, often without the speaker noticing.
- In Contagious, Berger lists social currency first among six drivers of sharing and names three ways to build it: inner remarkability, game mechanics and making people feel like insiders.
- In a field experiment on a microblogging service, users' image-related motive for posting was larger than their enjoyment of posting for most users (Toubia and Stephen, 2013).
- People whose product knowledge fell short of what they wanted to know shared more word of mouth, in more detail, to appear knowledgeable (Packard and Wooten, 2013).
- Across four experiments, the wish to self-enhance led people sharing their own experiences toward positive word of mouth (De Angelis and colleagues, 2012).
Five functions sit behind what people say about products, in Jonah Berger's count from his review of word-of-mouth research. One of them, impression management, is what social currency in marketing puts to work. The speaker spends reputation, and the product is only what gets mentioned. That reframes what a brand needs when it hopes to be talked about: a product with strong practical value gives the listener something useful, while a product with social currency gives the teller something worth being seen to know.
Berger's Contagious keeps the two apart, with practical value working for the receiver and social currency working for the sender, and the research below suggests the second deserves deliberate planning.
What does social currency in marketing mean?
In Contagious, Berger treats talk the way people treat clothes or cars: it shapes how others see the person using it. People want to come across as informed, successful and in the know, and passing on a surprising fact or an early find is one of the cheapest ways to do it. The currency is the listener's good opinion, and the sender earns it by being the person who knew.
Berger lists social currency first among the six drivers in his STEPPS Framework. The other five are triggers, emotion, public visibility, practical value and stories. Whose benefit is in view is the distinction that carries most weight, which is why something can be unremarkable as a bargain and still be rewarding to mention. Brands rarely control the exchange directly. What they control is the material: whether there is something to retell, something to show or something to be let into.
His later review of the research places impression management beside emotion regulation, information acquisition, social bonding and persuasion, and argues that these motives mostly serve the speaker, often without the speaker noticing. That is the sense in which social currency is spent. The same sentence can pass on information and, without anyone intending it, build an image, which is the exchange that identity signaling and status signaling describe from the side of the person doing the signalling.
How do the three levers earn it?
Berger names three ways to mint social currency. The first is inner remarkability, the quality of being novel, surprising or extreme enough that mentioning it says something good about the teller. The second is game mechanics: rules and feedback that show people where they stand, which work best when performance becomes a number or a status that others can see and compare. The third is making people feel like insiders, through scarcity, where supply is limited by demand, production, time or place, and through exclusivity, where access depends on meeting a condition.
Scarcity and exclusivity both restrict access, yet they restrict it differently, and the difference decides who feels chosen, a split that Which Kind of Scarcity Works on You takes up by sorting scarcity into four types by motive. What links all three levers is displayability. A remarkable fact travels because it is easy to repeat, a score travels because it can be shown, and an invitation travels because the person holding it has something to say about how it arrived.
Game mechanics are the lever most easily misread. The point is not points as such but quantification, a measure of performance that a person can see, track and show. Berger describes the pull as working in two ways, as achievement for the person and as comparison with others, which is why a visible measure spreads further than a private one. The table sets the levers side by side, with generic illustrations that are not drawn from any real case.
| Lever | What the sender gets to show | Generic illustration |
|---|---|---|
| Inner remarkability | That they know something surprising | A product with an unexpected use that people retell |
| Game mechanics | Where they stand, in a form others can read | A visible tier or points total in a loyalty scheme |
| Insider feeling | That they were let in | A limited release or a members-only access list |
What do studies say about image?
People who post without pay appear to weigh their image heavily. In a field experiment on a microblogging service, Olivier Toubia and Andrew Stephen added followers to some accounts and compared the posting of those users with a control group, then estimated what each user gained from posting. The design matters because follower counts and posting habits normally move together, which makes cause hard to separate, and the experiment changed the first while leaving each user's choices alone. The results fit two motives, the enjoyment of posting and the value of how posting shapes others' view of the poster, and in their estimates the image motive was the larger one for most users.
A gap between what people know and what they would like to know pushes them to talk. In four studies by Grant Packard and David Wooten, people whose actual product knowledge fell short of the knowledge they wanted to have shared more word of mouth, in more detail, to appear knowledgeable. The effect grew when people believed that sharing their knowledge would improve their self-image, and an analysis of the messages people wrote supported the account.
The kind of experience people share depends on whose it is. Across four experiments, Matteo De Angelis and colleagues found that the wish to self-enhance leads people who share their own experiences toward positive word of mouth, while for passing on what happened to others the same motive pushes the other way. Sharing is selective, and the selection tracks what the sender stands to gain.
Social currency is one lever among six, and it works alongside feeling, not instead of it. The emotional drivers are covered in What is emotional arousal, and a reading consistent with the sender-side logic is that content which leaves people deflated gives them less to spend, a pattern examined in Why Sad Posts Go Viral Less Often. It also differs from social proof, treated in What is social proof in marketing, where the question is what a receiver does after seeing others act, not what a sender is willing to say.
Audience matters as well. Berger also notes that audience and channel can change which of the five counts most, and in Packard and Wooten's studies the pull to show knowledge grew when the audience was psychologically close to the sender. The test is whether a sender can picture telling someone.
Common questions
What is social currency in marketing?
It is the standing a person gains by sharing something that makes them look good. Jonah Berger lists it first among the six drivers of sharing in Contagious, and it works for the sender, where practical value works for the receiver.
What are the three ways to build social currency?
Berger names inner remarkability, game mechanics and making people feel like insiders. Each gives the sender something to show, whether a surprising fact, a visible standing or a sense of having been let in.
Is social currency the same as social proof?
No. Social proof concerns what a receiver does after seeing what others have chosen. Social currency concerns what a sender is willing to say because of how it will make them look.
Do people share mainly to look good?
Research points to image as a large part of the picture. In a field experiment on a microblogging service the image motive was larger than the enjoyment of posting for most users, and other studies link sharing to the wish to appear knowledgeable or to self-enhance.
Sources
Berger, J. Contagious. Seed book; vault hub Books/Contagious.
Berger, J. (2014). Word of mouth and interpersonal communication: A review and directions for future research. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 24(4), 586-607. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2014.05.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2014.05.002
Toubia, O., & Stephen, A. T. (2013). Intrinsic vs. image-related utility in social media: Why do people contribute content to Twitter? Marketing Science, 32(3), 368-392. doi:10.1287/mksc.2013.0773 https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2013.0773
Packard, G. M., & Wooten, D. B. (2013). Compensatory knowledge signaling in consumer word-of-mouth. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 23(4), 434-450. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2013.05.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2013.05.002
De Angelis, M., Bonezzi, A., Peluso, A. M., Rucker, D. D., & Costabile, M. (2012). On braggarts and gossips: A self-enhancement account of word-of-mouth generation and transmission. Journal of Marketing Research, 49(4), 551-563. doi:10.1509/jmr.11.0136 https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.11.0136