Small Business Marketing

Stories provide people with a model showing them how to act. When a person shares a story, it is only natural for the listener to think, “How would I have reacted if I’d been in that situation?” Recently, a good friend of mine related a story on Facebook about a situation she encountered when taking

Making your idea emotional simply means that it needs to tap into something people care about. A frequently used technique is to talk about the consequences of ideas for individuals. When 18-month-old Jessica McClure fell into an old well in her aunt’s back yard in 1987, there was around the clock coverage. The world could

Credibility makes people believe in your ideas. When trying to establish credibility for your idea, we often rely on recognized authorities who have shared similar views. If the surgeon general endorses a plant-based diet, then who is to argue the point? Other times, we try to establish credibility by making use of statistics. When you

Sticky ideas create a visual that the other party can see and feel. Aesop’s Fables are great examples of abstract moral truths made concrete. For example, the abstract lesson to “always tell the truth” was concretely illustrated in “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” The distinguishing trait of concrete ideas is that you can picture them

Unexpectedness is about grabbing a person’s attention. You can grab an individual’s attention by surprising them with something that violates their expectations. Surprise is an emotion that forces a person to pause and collect more information about the world around them. Surprise gets a person’s attention in the moment, but curiosity holds their attention over

Simplicity is about finding the core message and sharing it in a concise way. The core message is the one important element you want to communicate. As the old saying goes, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” Imagine you are trying to develop a plan to instruct a friend on playing a

In their book, “Made to Stick, Why Some Idea Survive and Others Die,” brothers Chip and Dan Heath define a sticky idea as one that is understood, remembered, and creates some kind of change in a person’s opinion, behavior, or values. They studied the panorama of what makes ideas sticky by examining urban legends, ad