How To Make Your Ideas Sticky, SUCCESful and Profitable

Eat apple seeds and a tree will grow out of your stomach.

Swallow chewing gum and your bones will stick together.

Eat carrots and you’ll be able to see in the dark.

All rubbish of course, but chances are you’ve heard them all before…

You probably remember them from your childhood. They’ve stuck with you.

The question is why?

The answer is a powerful tool you can apply to your own ideas to make them memorable, make them useful and best of all, profitable…

Why you should have ‘sticky’ ideas

While I was in France this month, I met a chap called Justice Litle. You may recall I mentioned him a few weeks ago. He’s the Editorial Director of the Taipan Publishing Group and he’s a man who’s always full of ideas.

He introduced me to a book by two Brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, called Made to Stick. I’m reading it at the moment and finding it very interesting.

The Heath Brothers – one a Stanford Professor, one a Consultant and Havard Business School graduate – decided to find out why ideas like ‘eating apple seeds causes trees to grow out your stomach’ stick in our minds, why we remember them.

They wanted to identify the specific factors that make an idea memorable so that you can apply those same factors to make your own ideas memorable.

Imagine you’re setting up a home business… or advertising one you’ve already set up… or maybe you’re applying for a new job… or trying to convince people to donate to your charity…

Whatever it is, in essence you’re trying to communicate an idea.

That’s why it’s important your idea, above everyone else’s, sticks!

So what did the Heath Brothers discover?

How to make your ideas sticky, SUCCESful and profitable

Dan and Chip identified 6 factors that make ideas ‘stick’. They’re easily remembered if you think success (just drop an S – SUCCES).

Whatever idea you need to communicate, to make it stick in people’s minds you need to try to ensure it meets the 6 SUCCES factors they came up with…

Simplicity – Above all it needs to be simple. Simple ideas are easier to communicate and easier to remember. It’s needs to be simple but profound.

Unexpectedness – Weird, strange facts stick. Take the tree growing out your stomach. It sticks because it’s unexpected. Adding a level of intrigue strengthens your idea in people’s minds.

Concreteness – As much as unexpectedness helps to strengthen an idea, it needs to be founded on concrete details. Apple seeds, a tree, your stomach. These are all concrete concepts you can understand.

Credibility – Your idea needs to have some credibility, people need to believe it. Of course, these days your rational mind would dismiss a tree growing out of your stomach, but as a child, because it’s founded on concrete details, it’s possible to let your imagination believe it is possible.

Emotions – Ideas are remembered because we ‘feel’ them. Imagine a tree growing out your stomach. You’d be pretty scared right? The idea has tapped into your fear emotion. You need to work out which emotion your idea taps into.

Stories – When an idea is presented in a narrative, we pick it up much easier. If I tell you about a boy who once ate an apple and accidentally swallowed the seeds, when he got home he felt a rumbling in his stomach. He drank a glass of milk to settle it and went to bed early. In the morning he woke to find a little stalk growing out of his belly button… You could go away and tell that story straight back to someone else. The series of events, the key facts, stick in your mind.

If you can apply each of these factors to your ideas, you’ll find they are much easier to communicate, much more memorable and much more effective.

Have a go. Whether you’ve got an idea for a home business, or maybe an idea for a product you could sell, or just an idea you’d like to take to your boss at work… apply these factors and see how it improves.

Category: Business Success