You’ve worked tirelessly for the last three weeks, crafting, tossing, revamping and tweaking your message. Sales are slowly falling and motivation is dangling. If your team is going to grab onto this project and run with it, the message has got to STICK.
Fast forward one day, and picture yourself in that conference room. As you spot some hopeful faces, you proceed to give yourself a mental pat on the back.
The PowerPoint presentation led the team through some of the company’s past milestones, weaving in motivational quotes, referencing the company’s mission statement and leaving them with a passionate charge that “Today will be the day that this team reinstates this company’s vision of excellent customer service and technical support.”
Fast forward again. Two weeks later and you realize something is starting to stink. It’s not long before you realize that it’s the smell of disengagement, boredom and stagnation.
Discouraged, you start to feel that somewhere along the way your message must have fallen flat. Where did you go wrong?
If this sounds familiar, don’t fret. You join decades of public service announcements, charity campaigns, brand marketers and business leaders who’ve yet to figure out the recipe for STICKINESS.
Luckily for us, two savvy brothers took on the challenge several years ago to dissect what factors lead effective messages to leech onto the human mind. From the book, “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” comes this acronym recipe for sticky ideas:
- Simplicity. According to the Heath brothers, keeping messages simple is determining the single most important thing. Once you’ve figured that out, make sure you don’t bury it down below.
- Unexpectedness. Get attention by breaking people’s expectations. Break patterns to surprise them and peak their interest- butavoid gimmicks.
- Concreteness. Reframe abstraction and jargon so that it is concrete.
- Credibility. Convincing details, available statistics, and testable credentials.
- Emotional [component]. Figure out WHY people care, appeal to self interest and capitalize on the power of association and identities to impact emotionally.
- Stories. Stories can provide inspiration, stimulation, a guide for instructing people how to act,
- Sticks - Use what Sticks.
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