Social is the new currency 🪙
How to make your brand stand out
How do brands differentiate themselves?
And what factors influence whether they catch on?
Recently I read an interesting book 'Contagious' by Jonah Berger and he outlined 6 key characteristics that allow brands and products to stand out and win.
I'll be delving into each one to uncover ways brands can increase adoption and advocacy simultaneously. Hopefully, after this 6-part series, brands can use these steps to reverse engineer their way to brand affinity.
💸 So, let's start with Social Currency
It's a simple premise. People share things that make them look better. The smarter or more interesting they look, the more likely they are to purchase and share.
Events like getting promoted, being accepted into your dream university, or your start-up going public are all examples of events you would share to gain social currency. LinkedIn is a great place to share news like this, but not if no one is on the social network to read about it. So they figured out a way to get people to share outside the platform.
Some years ago, LinkedIn was figuring out how to get people to talk about the site, so they came up with a really interesting campaign. Rather than telling people to talk about LinkedIn, they sent people emails to say “You’re one of the most influential people on the site (Top 1%) of all people in your field”. What do you think people did with that email? They felt pretty special and thousands shared this on the platform.
Why?
Because they wanted to share with their network that they’re influential on LinkedIn. They didn’t care about the site itself or expanding their network, they just wanted to look good in front of their friends. When they shared this to look good in front of their peers, the site went along for the ride. This is social currency in action.
Social currency doesn’t build financial security, but it does build one’s reputation.
With no exception, we’re all more likely to share something that makes us look special, smart or in the know than something that doesn’t. We actually all have a psychological desire to talk about ourselves. On average people spend 60% of conversations talking about themselves.
On social media, this jumps to 80% (Not so shocking 👀).
We're all guilty of this, we simply love talking about ourselves and using social media posts to signal our identity to others. In our data-driven age, we have replaced luxury cars and clothing with high-value content. What we share affects how people see us.
🏆 Strategies to Win
Social currency helps drive brand adoption and advocacy across all customer touchpoints. Why? Because when we make customers look good, they'll want to talk about it to increase their social currency and raise awareness of your brand.
When companies upgrade you, it’s natural that you’d want to share. Friends seeing you flying first-class with Emirates to New York or Abu Dhabi makes you look good, and they’re mentioning the brands that made them look so great.
This offers brands an opportunity to leverage customer 'flexing' on social to boost their own profile. Win-win!
But Social Currency doesn’t just apply to expensive and flashy products. Any everyday product can create social currency. Take something like shoes, and I’m not talking Acquazurra shoes, I’m talking Crocs.
A friend of mine loves the brand, she rocks them in ‘sport mode’, and as much as I tease her about it, they offer excellent customer service. I ordered her a pair to surprise her for her birthday and the colour I wanted was out of stock, so I clicked ‘Notify me when available’. They sent me a follow-up email saying they’d located the last pair and I can now continue to purchase. Even better, they gave me a code to get next-day delivery for free! You’ll never see me in Crocs, but I will advocate for their customer experience.
To infuse social currency into your customer journey, try one of these strategies:
👀 1. Make customers feel like insiders
By making customers feel like insiders, you’re creating a sense of secrecy and mystery around the brand throughout the customer journey, which taps into a human desire to form part of an exclusive club, and increases the likelihood to purchase.
The first way to make people feel like insiders is to create a sense of scarcity.
Scarcity plays on our psychological FOMO. It signals to an audience limited availability or supply, which triggers people to act. It can be manufactured or actual, so it’s worth noting the difference between scarcity as a nudge and social currency. A nudge would be a message on a website such as Etsy telling you when there’s limited supply of an item.
This creates a sense of urgency and scarcity, but it’s not social currency, it’s a nudge. A nudge encourages user behaviour. Compare that with Coachella tickets that sell out in 4 hours, or fine art that sells at auctions for millions of dollars, or getting a table at the hottest restaurant but the only availability is at 10pm 3 weeks from now. which are limited and hard to obtain, therefore creating an illusion of status.
Another example of scarcity that creates social currency is ‘drop culture’, which is basically a controlled release of a new product. This could be because you don’t have many available, or because you’re strategically limiting release in a way that builds demand. Take Kanye West’s ‘Yeezy’ line, it’s early seasonal drop normally has a limited number of pairs. In 2015, when Adidas released it’s first collaboration with Yeezy, only 9,000 pairs were available and they sold out in ten minutes.
Scarcity is low-hanging fruit for new brands that can be used as a marker of distinction. Leverage the fact that no one knows about you and build a secret campaign.
The second way to make customers feel like insiders is exclusivity. This is less about the number available and more about access. You have to have the knowledge, the network or the money to be part of an elite group.
Let’s take a look at ‘Superhuman’ - they drove intrigue and loyalty with an exclusive marketing approach. Joining this exclusive email app is hard, the waitlist is roughly 200,000 people. Some people wait years to be accepted, while others get in immediately. This allows ‘Superhuman’ to feel like an exclusive club. People wanting access spend a lot of time trying to get into it, making them more excited when they’re finally accepted, and more likely to talk about it when they do.
Exclusivity is also used in B2B contexts, with exclusive agreements to differentiate a brand from its competition. American Express has developed an exclusive, premium reputation, not just with airport lounges, but also partnering with brands like Hilton, Delta, Equinox and Clear to offer exclusive credit card perks. Training at fancy gyms, getting class upgrades and skipping lines makes their consumers look good, which encourages them to share these perks with others.
Exclusivity allows brands to display high-value products that users can leverage on their own platforms as social currency. Like when Notion gave their users early access to their API, or how American Express embeds exclusivity in their offering ‘Membership Week’. We’re definitely tweeting that.
Exclusivity works well for well-established brands and can offer early access to members in their loyalty programs.
🎢 2. Leverage game mechanics
The next strategy that brands can foster social currency is to leverage game mechanics. Gamification is a great way to quantify performance to allow people to see where they rank relative to others. Humans have been defining themselves by their status on the totem pole for centuries, and this isn’t changing anytime soon.
Brands can engage people with fun, game-like elements such as levels, points and rewards. Why does gamification work? Because we care about our status in relation to other people and games have built-in opportunities for comparison. Climbing to the top of a leaderboard feeds our need for validation and gets addictive very quickly. Think of apps like Strava, by quantifying users’ activity, Strava taps into our internal motivation to compete and keeps users engaged.
But not all gamification creates social currency. To be able to successfully create social currency with game mechanics and before you start to think of ways to add gamification to your brand strategy, ask yourself two questions; Is this a metric your users care about? Does sharing this make people look good?
In Strava’s case, the app allows runners and bikers to compare their route completion time against others, a metric users care deeply about, and makes them look good if they’re on the leaderboard. People naturally compete to be the king or queen of the mountain. Strava didn’t create that motivation, it’s already there. Humans are naturally competitive, but Strava quantified it and turned it into something that created engagement among their users.
✨ 3. Find inner remarkability
The third and final strategy is to find your product or service’s inner remarkability. To do this, you need to identify the key feature that makes your product worth talking about, and show rather than tell people about this feature.
We’ve heard the term USP (unique selling proposition) time and time again, but how unique is a product if there are 10 others describing a competing offering in the same way?
Inner remarkability can also be applied in a B2B setting, take Volvo’s legendary Van Damme campaign. Volvo wanted to showcase a new steering system, that’s extremely precise and wanted to show this in a remarkable way. To do this they featured an action star, Jean Claude Van Damme, to perform his epic split. Hundreds of millions of people watched this video and sales went through the roof. But this video wasn’t just engaging, it demonstrated inner remarkability very clearly, because it showed rather than told how precise the new steering system is.
Another example of inner remarkability is LifeStraw. Normally you wouldn’t dare drink water that isn’t bottled. But LifeStraw offers a solution for hikers and campers to drink from lakes and rivers with its advanced micro-filtering technology, which removes 99.99% of common bacteria from water. Images and videos of people using the straw and drinking directly from lakes and rivers flooded social media and showed the product’s inner remarkability and gives its users social currency, which makes them want to share.
Dive deep to uncover why your brand or product is remarkable. Once you find your product’s inner remarkability, double down on it and create a campaign to show rather than tell.
Before you go, here’s what you need to know:
Key Takeaways
The better you make people look, the more likely they are to share.
Scarcity and exclusivity can make people share in a wide variety of industries
Use gamification wisely
Thank you for tuning in to my first newsletter! See you tomorrow, we’ll be taking a closer look at the social media goldmine - Instagram.
Have a contentful day 🌞
Emma