As humans, we’re programmed to seek, crave, and reach for status. It’s everywhere in products today - Twitter Followers, Total views, Verified badges, Likes on posts, etc. Status is also how network effects form and why we keep checking for notifications on our apps.

Status is how products become addictive.

Storr, who's a novelist and author of The Status Game, the Science of Storytelling and Selfie explains how the status game works -

We begin with a question, form a belief, and join groups that validate that belief. Once we join a tribe, we identify the most powerful, high-status members and mimic their beliefs, tastes, and behaviors. “We do this partly as a gameplay strategy: by blindly adopting the opinions and habits of the successful, we hope to become successful ourselves

If you observe how we get into new trends like NFT, it kind of follows a similar pattern -

1. We begin with a question - What's this NFT everyone's talking about?
2. We form a belief - All the well respected people in my circle are are talking about it, so there must be something good about it
3. We join groups that validate that belief - We get onto places like twitter or other groups where more people talk about it
4. We identify the most powerful and mimic them - We see the best performers, what NFT they bought and try to imitate their behaviour by learning about them, so we can flaunt our collection too

This makes sense, but can we see a similar pattern in other products as well?

We always begin with a question when we want to try a new product - "Will this product solve my problem". We form a belief based on reviews & ratings - "Oh, this app is rated 5 stars on the app store" . We join groups that validate that belief - in this case, it's registering into the app and going all the way until the end to validate a belief that it would work.”

And then if it works, your promise is delivered. Their belief was right. They’ll likely use the same product again or maybe even tell someone else about it.

But what about the fourth one? The one aspect that the social media apps seem to have done so well? How can other products build on a desire for status to retain their users?

Circle badges are a great example of status. Within the status community, based on your activity your community moderator can give you a badge that goes next to your name.

What if a food delivery app tried something similar? For example rewarding badges for it's most loyal and frequent users and launching marketing campaigns specifically for them could be a great way to promote status. Another example could be changing the food packaging for all its loyal customers to promote public recognition of status.

Also, status is not simple gamification. Status needs a network to work.

I see why this could get confused with gamification sometimes. If you just reward points to your customers for every purchase, they won’t mean anything other than discounts in the future. Gamification without a community would be of no value to status.