In previous posts, I've mentioned that I read All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin and that I am in the process of reading Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath.

While they cover different aspects, both books talk about what makes a message or story sticky. But that's not what I'm going to write about in this entry.

I'm going to write about the way the books are written.

Godin has a distinctive writing style; he wrote the book as if he was writing for the web. Lots and lots of subtitles and a fair amount of repetition.

I'll come clean here and say that I was unimpressed with this. It seemed unnecessarily simple for a book. After all, he's writing for an intelligent audience; we can follow an argument without a lot of hand holding in the form of subtitles.

Then I started Made to Stick. The authors are building a fairly complicated, but interesting, argument. The book is well written and I'm often struck by the ideas in it.

The problem is that on a good day I get 30 minutes of reading in, generally during my commute on the train. My reading is too interrupted to be able to follow the authors' argument as closely as it deserves.

Godin has apparently made a shrewd observation (or maybe just fell into a happy accident): Marketers are busy people; a certain amount of hand holding is good for communicating an idea.

The apparent simplicity of approach that Godin uses in his structure wouldn't be necessary in a novel. In a novel, there's a story to follow which anchors the details in the reader's mind.

Building an argument follows a different structure, though. It's not a narrative; it's a series of ideas and facts that are cited to establish the truth of a hypothesis. Because there's no narrative structure to give the facts and information form, it's easier to lose track of the details and therefore lose the thread of the argument.

I was disappointed (on several levels) when Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, said that he planned to blog less in the future. Influential Marketing Blog put up an interesting post earlier this week about what went wrong for Adams with his blog.

The take home message is:

"The problem for Scott is that the voice many Dilbert readers expect from him is the voice of Dilbert ... not the voice of Scott Adams. ... the Dilbert Blog, written in the voice of Scott Adams created a blog dissonance. Free or not free, if your blog ends up having a different voice than what your audience expects, then you may need to come to a similar realization about your blog. "

I'm reading Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. I'm still not far enough into the book to say what I think of it, but they have a great opening.

The first passage — an arresting and memorable urban legend — is as unexpected as it is effective. They compare the urban legend to some painfully dull corporate copy, which is, of course, totally forgettable.

Their point is that how memorable a story is is directly related to how sticky it is. The more memorable, the more sticky.

So I read with interest Virtual Hosting's post Top 20 Hilarious and Creative Internet Scams.

A fair number of the scams rely on people forwarding them to their friends. The successful scams are the sticky ones.

It goes without saying that scams are something all marketers should stay away from. What is interesting, though, is looking at why these are so sticky.

Some boil down to sheer entertainment or outrage (mummified fairies and 87 pound cats), some play on anxiety (deodorant causes breast cancer) and some on old-fashioned greed (the Disney hoax). What they all have in common, though, is that they are highly memorable.

Last week, I posted about Seth Godin's book All Marketers Are Liars, and I've been thinking about stories, how they work in everyday life and what this means for marketing ever since.

Understanding the World

A story is a series of connected events or ideas that we tell ourselves in order to establish order and spot patterns in an inherently chaotic world. One of the primary reasons people tell themselves stories is to connect cause and effect, and to make predictions about the world around them.

So, to take a simple example, if a vase is perched on the edge of a table, it falls and breaks, the sequence of events — the story — is obvious. Without the ability to put this into a narrative, it would just be a series of individual events — a broken vase, a falling vase, a vase on the table — that didn't have a connection.

People tell stories (about how a vase broke in this case) in order to process the world and to make it intelligible.

Stories are also a sort of mental shorthand; instead of having to re-learn everything every time, we recognize similar patterns and think that the "story" will run much the same way again. In the example above, if we saw the vase fall and break once, and then, in a different situation, see a broken vase next to a table, we might guess that it also fell off a table.

Part of the power of a story is its ability to link into previously established expectations.

Lists

Humans are typically not very good at remembering isolated information, but can remember it as part of a narrative. If people are presented with a series of facts, they're unlikely to take them in. Whereas, if they are part of a story, they make sense and are more persuasive.

A list of facts might be:

Acme Stores
10% off
Mention code Hqwdasg123
code good until Dec 31
Stores in New York only

A better story (with a coherent narrative) would be:

"Acme is offering an end-of-the-year special in all of its New York stores! Mention this ad, and we'll give you 10% off."

When trying to communicate information, if it's told as a story, it's much more intelligible and memorable.

Details

Stories can also be used to help people think through a process you want them to follow.

A call to action works this way. "Click here to learn more!" is really a story that says "If you click on this link, it will take you to a new page where you will learn more about the product you have been looking at."

This is powerful and it works because it gives people a cause and effect framework, or narrative, to move forward with.

Story Format

It's not enough just to tell a story, though.

At an old job, we would sometimes have extra media that needed to be filled and went preferentially to certain companies as a value add.

If I called up a company and said that we had some space and would they like it, they took it about 50% of the time. They were busy people and couldn't always get things together.

However, if I called them up and said, "We have this media open. I thought of you; we can give it to you as a value add. The only thing is, I have to have an answer today, otherwise it will go to another company."

The success rate was more like 80%. It was partially the urgency that got people to focus. It was probably also a question of status and winning; they were beating out another company to a prize spot. How I told the story (both times completely honestly) re-framed how they thought about their answer.

Godin's Argument

To tie this back into All marketers Are Liars, Godin's argument is that marketers should tell a really good story — one that attracts people and that people instantly connect with and understand — and this will help set a product apart and sell it. A really good story is also "sticky"; it stays in people's minds.

For instance, Apple has told a very persuasive story that their products are cool, and this has helped to make them successful.

Apple's story helps people slot the products into a category ("cool"). Once this is established, people don't have to re-analyze the products each time they see them; they already know what to expect.

The other powerful part of Apple's story is that because the products are cool, the effect is that the people who use them are also cool. While it doesn't stand up to rational analysis, it works in emotional terms.

(There's a Marketing Genius post that talks about the 5 drivers that sell a product - money, looks, popularity, health and sex. Apple is tapping into at least one of these, and arguably more.)

Conclusion

As I noted in the earlier post, I find Godin's conclusion about the power of large stories to market products convincing. I think he's pointing to something much more fundamental about how people think, though.

For people to follow and understand something, it's more effective for it to be a story than a series of facts. The story can be anything from the big marketing story behind a new product to the small stories we tell to direct people through a website or convinve them to sign up for a piece of media.

The stories give people a framework that means they don't have to analyze every action. Instead they can move forward with the narrative.

Not everything boils down to a story, of course. People have other ways of dealing with the world; but stories are powerful.

I've been very busy just recently, but I did get to spend this evening catching up on some reading.

A post on Seth Godin's blog caught my eye. To sum up the moral, once you put it on the internet, prepare for it to be there for a long time. (Also a good moral for those of us who blog.)

I also enjoyed Neuromarketing's piece on how to really upset a customer.

And finally, I found this a little hard to believe over at MarketingSherpa, but it could also be included in the "how to really upset a customer" file.

Virtual Host has a post up about eye tracking studies and web design that has some interesting conclusions from a marketing perspective.

The findings range from the obvious (shorter paragraphs perform better than longer ones) to the completely counter intuitive. In the counter intuitive pile is that people look at text before they look at images. In fact, quite a lot of the article is about viewers ignoring images and anything that looks like an ad. This comment particularly struck me:

"In fact, studies showed that users had difficulty finding information in large colored letters [with fancy formatting and fonts] because visual clues told them to ignore it."

So what's a marketer to do? The authors mention that ads placed next to the best content are seen more often (which is not surprising) and that text ads are viewed more intently than other types of ads:

"[Text ads] aren’t distracting and blend in with the rest of the content on the page, making them less visually irritating to the reader and ultimately more successful."

It's certainly an idea worth testing, though I'm not totally convinced.

The whole post can be found here.