How to Make Your Ideas Stick
Some ideas come and go but others stick in your mind long after you hear them. There's a science to making your ideas stickier.
Do you remember when you first got a cellphone, and you’d receive chain messages instructing you to pass the text on to five people or something terrible would happen? There were many variations on it, and it’ll be familiar to anyone pre-smartphone.
A more modern one was Momo, which was a meme that purportedly told kids to self-harm and eventually kill themselves. Momo turned out to be a hoax, but the frightening puppet and the threat to children sent the meme viral anyway.
Both of these urban legends are sticky ideas. They stick in the minds of people, then the ideas spread far and wide. It’s the type of idea that generates traffic that marketers dream of.
Chip and Dan Heath write Made to Stick to tease out the things that make some ideas stickier than others. If you have a social media account, you’re a marketer and can learn something from the science of stickiness.
The Six Principles of Stickiness
The Heath brothers begin by offering six principles of stickiness:
Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotions
Stories
The Momo story adheres to all six of these principles. It’s a simple and surprising story. The harm it was said to deliver on children was concrete and gained credibility from legions of panicked parents attesting to Momo’s authentic danger. Violence against children is an obvious emotional attachment. Finally, Momo made an incredible story. It was like a digital ghost moving from screen to screen invisibly harming children. What horror fan wouldn’t be sucked into that story?
These principles don’t have to be applied to viral hoaxes. Other urban legends have the same level of stickiness. The Heaths offer examples of other sticky ideas early in their book:
“Coco-Cola rots your bones.”
“The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object that is visible from space.”
“You use only 10 percent of your brain.”
These ideas are false, but you’ve probably heard them repeated as if they’re time-tested wisdom.
They haven’t been tested by the people who repeat these claims. Otherwise, they’d have been proven wrong and would be less fun to spread. They have stood the test of time though, and there is a template for generating ideas with the potential to become sticky.
Turning Principles into Process
The Heaths spend time breaking down their principles of stickiness and shortly arrive at a process you can use to refine your message:
“(1) Identify the central message you need to communicate — find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message — i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.”
Their writing style is repetitive, but drilling down on the essence of your idea is one of the most important steps to making it sticky. It also helps you avoid being as repetitive as the Heaths.
The counterintuitiveness is the surprise the idea generates. Think about Momo again. Many parents were surprised that an internet figure could drive their children to hurt themselves. The adults probably thought of the worst grooming scenarios they could conjure and projected those fears onto the fake meme.
In reality, it takes more than a scary image and a creepy voice to drive young people to hurt themselves. They’re impressionable, not (always) stupid. However, the surprise behind the power of a common communication tool like a meme gave Momo a boost she wouldn’t have had otherwise.
There wasn’t a PR firm behind Momo. However, anyone who was running her page could’ve created even more fear by breaking down exactly how Momo worked her magic. This fictional PR firm could’ve leaked examples of Momo grooming and convincing young people to hurt themselves through promises of status or through credible threats. Understanding how Momo worked would’ve given the adults more to panic about, discuss, and spread.
Everyone’s a Marketer Now
Not everyone can make a post go viral, but anyone can improve their content’s ability to reach wider audiences. Your social media accounts are ways to try to simplify your posts and surprise your audience. That gives you time to explain why the surprise is true, giving your audience reasons to stay engaged with your content.
You’ll see this structure in viral videos. The surprise and simplicity come in the first few seconds, and the rest of the video is the explanation.
Made to Stick is a great collection of cases showing how marketers have refined their ideas. You don’t have to be well-versed in business to understand the book, and you may enjoy the stories even if you don’t spend much time in the business section of the bookstore.