Sticky Services
Saturday, November 17, 2007 – 9:20 am
I really enjoyed reading Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. I actually believe the term stickiness predates Malcolm Gladwell, but he certainly popularized it as a way to describe things people become attached to after trying. For instance,
- digital video recorders
- checking accounts with electronic bill pay
- loyalty rewards credit cards
Where’s the tie-in to e-commerce?
One of the challenges of etailing is that the Internet has created a transactional mindset. People want to buy and then move on. But what you want as a vendor is a relationship, not a transaction. And the way to create the relationship is to make your site more sticky.
The Heaths address stickiness from the perspective of ideas (rather than products or services), but the concepts they teach can be applied to a variety of things, including your marketing campaign.
They created the acronym ‘SUCCES’ to represent the steps you must take to make an idea sticky:
- Simplicity - eliminate the excess; focus on the core of the message.
- Unexpectedness - surprise them to gain focus
- Concreteness - nothing ambiguous, jargony, or abstract
- Credibility - use an expert, compelling details or a statistic
- Emotions - make them feel something when they hear your message.
- Stories - telling a story instead of a series of facts gives your message resonance.
My only criticism of this mnemonic is that it doesn’t include the last S which I thought was quite obvious:
- Specificity - in the Information Age, people armed with data gleaned from the Internet and other sources are acting as their own physician, general contractor and psychiatrist. They’re no longer impressed by vague claims (”breakfast of champions”); they want to understand the specific benefits of the product to their own situation (”contains vitamin Z9 for healthier skin and nails”).
Arguably this is a rehash of Concrete, but it rounds out the acronym so I’m sticking with it. 
