How to get referrals? The art of offline conversions

Despite the attention social media receives, 93% of conversations that influence purchases still happen offline.

For growth marketers, this creates an immediate challenge: How do you make your brand part of the offline conversations you can’t see, track, or measure?

In this article I’ll introduce a new, psychological framework called SPARK that you can use to get strangers to talk about your brand in their day-to-day conversations.

If you use it, your brand will get more referrals, reduce your cost of customer acquisition (CAC), increase your sales close rate, and turn your customers’ offline conversations into your most effective distribution channel.

If this sounds like marketing hype, the results certainly aren’t.

Harry’s Razors turned a small pre-launch audience into more than 100,000 email subscribers in a single week, with 77% of signups coming through referrals rather than paid acquisition.

How referrals lower marketing costs & boosts reach

Imagine two companies with the same advertising budget: Company A and Company B. Each acquires one new customer every month through advertising. The difference is that every new customer acquired by Company A goes on to refer one additional customer, while Company B generates no referrals at all.

If this scenario plays out consistently for 12 straight months, Company A will sign 510 new customers in the same time and cost that it takes for Company B to get just 12. That’s 42.5× as many customers—for the exact same ad spend.

This is why the top marketing teams spend time building referral mechanisms into their content, products, and services—the payoff is astronomical.

What exactly is a referral?

A referral is a recommendation that someone who has used your product or service gives to another person. It is one of the most powerful forms of marketing because it transfers trust. Instead of evaluating a business from scratch, people borrow the judgment of someone they already know and respect.

In growth marketing, a referral is the final stage of the sales and marketing funnel. It occurs when a customer has experienced enough value from your product, service, or content that they voluntarily recommend it to someone else. For example, they might forward your marketing email to a friend, repost your Instagram post to their followers, or tell their industry peers that they use your product or service.

But referrals are not random acts of customer enthusiasm. There is a science behind them.

What are the different types of referral?

There are many different types of referral such as word-of-mouth, online reviews, user-generated content (UGC), influencer recommendations, affiliate referrals and so on. However, broadly speaking, we can classify them into one of five channels that I set out in the table below.

Type	Example
Word of mouth	“You should try this restaurant.”
Customer referrals	A friend sends you a referral link.
Online reviews	Google Reviews, G2, Trustpilot.
Social sharing	LinkedIn posts, TikToks, Instagram Stories.
Testimonials & case studies	Customer stories used in marketing.

Although these channels look different, they’re all driven by the same underlying psychology principles that compel people to share referrals. Let’s explore how to tap into these psychological triggers to create content, products, and experiences people naturally want to share.

The SPARK Framework: How to get referrals from anyone

To engineer products, services, and content that people want to recommend, we need to first understand why people share, and then how to design for that behaviour.

The SPARK Framework is a way to do both. It distills decades of research in psychology, sociology, and marketing into a practical five-part system for understanding why people make referrals, and how to build products, services, and campaigns that people naturally refer onto others in their everyday conversations.

1. S — Social Currency — Give people something worth sharing
2. P — Psychological Emotion — Create feelings that drive action
3. A — Audience Relevance — Make ideas matter to specific communities
4. R — Remarkability — Create moments people want to talk about
5. K — Knowledge Transfer — Make sharing effortless

Social currency

Your reputation is like a passport that grants you entry into different social circles. For humans, this has always been incredibly important to us because our survival depends on belonging to a group. This is why any damage to your reputation is the stuff of nightmares.

When we recommend something, we attach a small piece of our reputation to it. The recommendation signals to the social group what kind of person we are. It is like a form of social currency that signals our tastes, our knowledge, and our ability to discover valuable things before others.

This is why we share a restaurant that makes us look like we have great taste, recommend a real-estate agent that makes us look well connected and helpful, or send our boss a new AI tool that makes us appear innovative and in the know. In short, we don’t make referrals because we want to advertise a product. We share things because every recommendation is a way for us to demonstrate our social value.

How to create something with social currency

In his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger gives us the tools to develop a product or service with social currency. These are:

1. Your product must demonstrate inner remarkability,
2. You must leverage game mechanics, and
3. You must make people feel like insiders.

For a something to be referable, it must be “remarkable”. In this context, remarkable means exciting, interesting, or novel. This is why people find mysteries or controversies such good gossip. They undermine a core belief and make people ask each other, how or why does this work. ChatGPT is a perfect example. This was a new system that undermined the belief that artificial intelligence was only useful for narrow, technical tasks. It became remarkable when it demonstrated that anyone could use a simple conversation interface to create content, solve problems, and automate complex knowledge work in seconds.

When people think about game mechanics, they often picture “gamified systems” of badges, streaks, or cash rewards. But the most powerful mechanics are often more subtle—they create status, achievement, and belonging. Microsoft demonstrates this through its AI partner ecosystem. Becoming a certified partner requires expertise and investment, making the credential more than a badge—it becomes a signal of capability and credibility. This creates social currency: a reason for partners to showcase their expertise and strengthen their reputation.

Lastly, create social currency by making people feel like insiders. The best games quantify status through visible reward systems that are easy for outsiders to recognize. These systems keep people engaged by giving them something to pursue while providing public symbols of achievement. Microsoft’s startup and partner ecosystem does this well: founders unlock progressively greater benefits, certifications, and recognition as they deepen their commitment to the platform, turning expertise into a status signal that others aspire to earn.

Psychological emotion

In sci-fi movies, characters buy bottled joy or synthetic courage to instantly change how they feel. While marketers cannot bottle emotions, they can engineer experiences that create them. The difference is that not all emotions motivate action—some create the psychological arousal that drives people to share, however others stimulate inaction. The table below breaks down the emotions that drive action and those that don’t.

Emotion	Pleasantness	Arousal	Likelihood of Sharing
Awe	Positive	High	Very High
Excitement	Positive	High	Very High
Anger	Negative	High	Very High
Anxiety / Fear	Negative	High	High
Sadness	Negative	Low	Lower
Contentment	Positive	Low	Lower

What makes awe special

The most powerful emotion for arousing action is “awe”. This is when the consumer of your product or content experiences a mini epiphany or suddenly seeing something in a new way. For instance, take a look at the following image. This image is the “Pale Blue Dot”. It shows Earth as a tiny speck suspended in the vastness of space.

If you stop for a moment and put yourself into the shoes of the astronauts who took this photograph, you will start to feel a mixture of terror, fear, apprehension, amazement, surprise, and distraction. This cocktail of contradictory emotions makes use experience uncertainty and, in our grapple with uncertainty we feel a moment of pure, unforgettable revelation.

Take a look at Robert Plutchik’s “wheel of emotions” below. Notice how many layers of the wheel combine together to create the sensation of awe.

Experiencing such awe initially makes us abandon all sense of attentional control so that after we “take it in” and “lose ourselves” we then start to wonder. We become compelled to want to solve the mystery, due to our human nature of wanting closure. It is this feeling that drives the action to share.

Many digital marketers struggle to translate the raw technical utility of what they do into a high-arousal emotional narrative. I use the following three steps to help me work through this challenge:

1. Identify the primary way your existing customers physically interact with your product or service today
2. Take this core human interaction and turn it into a story
3. Choose a story that aims to create a chosen cocktail of emotions

Google’s “Parisian Love” Ad campaign is a perfect example of this process. The tech giant took a complex product, whose features include predictive text algorithms, rapid indexing, and millisecond search queries, and turned these into a breathtaking, wordless love story that felt profoundly human.

Audience relevance

People refer stuff that they find valuable. There are two types of value that a product, service, or bit of content can create:

1. Practical value (which we will discuss in the next section)
2. Social value

Social value does not arise arise from the product’s features. It emerges from the meaning that people collectively attach to a product, service, or brand. Rather than solving a practical problem, social value helps people express who they are and what they stand for.

What is symbolic value

Traditional marketing methods often struggle to build symbolic value because they begin with abstract brand descriptions. For instance you might hear something like: “Our brand stands for excitement, passion, adventure, and empowerment.” These words sound inspiring, but they provide little creative direction.

On the other hand, great brands connect those values to real communities, beliefs, rituals, and cultural movements that already exist. For example, Red Bull translates “excitement” into extreme sports, while GoPro translates it into capturing and sharing personal adventures.

Volkswagen’s famous Think Small campaign is a classic example. During the 1960s, American manufacturers promoted large, powerful cars as symbols of success and status. Volkswagen deliberately took the opposite position. Rather than selling the Beetle as a better car, it positioned it as a symbol of intelligence, authenticity, and non-conformity. The campaign resonated with New York’s creative and intellectual communities before spreading into the mainstream. Buying a Beetle became a way of expressing an identity—not just purchasing a vehicle.

This is why social value drives referrals. People don’t simply recommend products that work; they recommend products that reinforce who they are or who they aspire to become. The stronger the symbolic meaning attached to your brand, the more social value people gain by talking about it—and the more likely they are to recommend it to others.

Remarkability

As we’ve just seen, brands can create either social value or practical value. Practical value comes from what a product objectively does: it saves time, saves money, improves quality, or makes life easier. When something delivers an unusually useful benefit, it becomes remarkable—literally, worthy of remark.

People naturally recommend products, services, and content that solve problems because sharing them enhances their own reputation as someone who is knowledgeable, resourceful, and helpful. In other words, practical value creates social value for the person making the referral.

To engineer remarkability, focus on reducing the time to value—the time it takes someone to experience a meaningful benefit. The faster customers see results, the sooner they have something worth talking about. The tactics below will help you increase both actual and perceived value, making your product more remarkable and, ultimately, more referable.

Knowledge transfer

Social proof shows us that we look to the actions and experiences of others when deciding what to believe or do. However most of what people do happens in private. Knowledge transfer is the mechanism that makes those private experiences visible, allowing them to become social proof that can influence others.

The classic example is Hotmail. In the 1990s, Hotmail was competing against established providers like AOL, but email had a fundamental growth problem: nobody could see which email service someone was using. Unlike a pair of shoes, a car, or a phone, email was invisible. To solve this, Hotmail embedded a simple signature at the bottom of every message: “Get your free email at Hotmail.” Every email became a recommendation, and every user became a distribution channel. Apple later applied the same principle with its default “Sent from my iPhone” signature.

If people can’t see your product, they can’t talk about it. Great growth marketers therefore design products, services, and content that naturally transfer knowledge from one person to another. They create visible cues, reminders, and behavioural residue that persist long after the original interaction, continually exposing new people to the brand.

The tactics below will help you build knowledge transfer directly into your product, service, or marketing.

Final remark: Referrals in the age of AI

In this article, I’ve introduced a five-part framework called SPARK that explains why people naturally recommend some brands, products, services and ideas while ignoring others. By engineering these psychological triggers into your marketing, you can generate more referrals, lower your customer acquisition costs, increase the reach of your content, and reduce your dependence on paid advertising.

The challenge for growth marketers is not to create more content. It is to create products, services, campaigns, and experiences that build social currency, trigger high-arousal emotions, deliver practical value, connect to cultural conversations, and remain top of mind when people are deciding what to recommend.

In the age of AI, this matters now more than ever.

AI can generate content in seconds, but it struggles to generate genuinely distinctive ideas. As more companies rely on the same tools and prompts, marketing risks converging on the same safe messages. The brands that win in this world will be those that engineer products, campaigns, and experiences people can’t help talking about—because those conversations create the influence that both humans and AI referrals.