Practical Value
Berger's fifth STEPPS lever: people pass on useful information because helping someone is cheap and the credit is real.
What it is
His framing is that social currency is about the sender and practical value is about the receiver, which is a clean distinction and the most portable idea in the chapter. On this site it is read alongside STEPPS Framework, Social Currency and The Rule of 100.
In effect
Ken Craig's video of an eighty-six-year-old man shucking corn in a microwave passed five million views, with unusually old viewers for a viral clip. Nothing about it is remarkable, emotional or high status. It is simply useful, and it reached the people most likely to need it.
What it does not say
It is not the same thing as STEPPS Framework, which sits close to it on this site but describes a different part of how people decide. It also does not say that the finding reaches every product, buyer or setting; where this page goes beyond the cited research, the step is an inference and is labelled as one.
Sources
- Marketing professor at Wharton who studies why things catch on.