Tonight I’ve been reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I have a book report on it due for my marketing class on Sunday, and I just finished the chapter on stickiness.
Basically, the chapter is about the importance of finding a way to make whatever you’re marketing stick, about finding a way to make information irresistible. According to Gladwell, much of what we’re told or watch we simply don’t remember. The information that does stick with us does so because of factors that have made our minds gravitate to it and hold on… i.e. stickiness.
Tonight – before homework, after dinner – I watched an M. Night Shamyalan movie with Chris called The Happening. I don’t do scary, so Chris told me all the times when I needed to cover my eyes. I’ve gotta say, without the gore of people killing themselves, the movie was kind of flat. Half-baked acting didn’t help, but I felt like Shamyalan could have developed his plot, or at least the depth of it, even more. Chris had hyped up the movie a lot, which is why I’m writing about it… I just wasn’t impressed.
On the other hand, I accidentally discovered a blog late last night called The Simple Dollar (I’ve added it to my blogroll) that I’ve returned several times, and I’ve even subscribed to the RSS feed so I get updates in my email inbox. What made this blog stick? Chris and I are really starting our business, we’re DINKs (dual-income-no-kids) as far as social categories go, and we can either maximize these years or waste them. The Simple Dollar is packed with practical, real world advice that we can implement now and lessons that we can learn from… so hopefully we don’t have to learn everything the hard way.
Gladwell closes the chapter on stickiness with this cryptic conclusion:
The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.
So marketing is 50% science and 50% guessing. Sometimes I think I’m crazy for being in this business, but at the same time, the thrill of working with the right clients and using creativity to figure out what works is absolutely addicting.
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