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.