Make Your Message “Sticky” by Identifying Trends

In his breakthrough bestseller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Back Bay Books, 2002), author Malcolm Gladwell asserts, “We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make messages more contagious — how to reach as many people as possible with our products or ideas. But the hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other. Stickiness means that a message makes an impact. You can’t get it out of your head. It sticks in your memory.”

There is no doubt that we all yearn for more “stickiness” in our messages. But sticky to whom? Our audience? Or ourselves? In the last section we talked about speaking our audience’s language, so that should be a good indicator; what sticks to us may not necessarily stick to them.

Companies frequently get so internal that they forget the external. We get so excited about our ad copy, our product design, our packaging, our message, our website, our concept and our ideas that we forget what others think of us is what matters most when it comes to actually clicking on our site and making a purchase.

Part of that struggle for stickiness is in speaking the language of our audience; another part is in predicting what our audience will want before they even know it. This is where trends come in – and if there’s anything stickier on this planet than a hardcore trend, I’d like to know about it.

But, too often, we are content to sit back and spot a trend rather than digging more deeply to predict a trend. Following a trend is a guaranteed way NOT to hit the bull’s eye; at best, you might get lucky and land on one of the peripheral spots on the dartboard – at worst, you will miss the board, and your opportunity, altogether.

I’ll never forget the year John Grisham first published his breakthrough bestseller, The Firm. That’s because a friend of mine worked in a bookstore at the time and would report back – daily, ad nauseam, at a high pitch – about the book’s seemingly inexhaustible success. It wasn’t so much admiration that inspired these daily updates, but rather wonder and awe; he’d never quite seen anything like it.

Customer after customer, browser after browser, rushed into the store looking for The Firm. More often than not, the book would be completely sold out and my friend would recommend an equally strong substitute. For instance, Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow had been published several years earlier and was available in paperback – a substantial savings off The Firm’s current hardback edition.

No dice. Customers wanted The Firm and would accept no substitutions. But John Grisham had done more than start a trend; he single-handedly primed the pump for a whole new literary genre: the legal thriller. My friend often commented, “If only we’d seen this trend coming, we could have really cashed in.”

I would often comment to my friend, with a wry kind of smile and a knowing wink, that he should have spotted the need for such a trend long before Grisham did. After all, he worked in the ultimate reference section: a bookstore.

He could have simply wandered up and down the aisles during any one of his shifts and spotted the gaps where legal thrillers would one day dominate. But like so many of us, my Firm-envious friend was content to follow trends rather than predict them.

See the opportunities before they become a trend. Don’t sit back and wait; follow up and act. Stay on the cusp; do not sit back and follow – get out there and lead. Tweak trends, try new things, research effectively and get to know what your audience knows before they even know it.