Great marketing messages are inherently sticky. The best are visual or even visceral. Urban legends (e.g. stolen kidneys and razor apples) are a great example of sticky messages.
The six principles of stickiness are:
1. Simplicity - "simple and profound"
2. Unexpectedness - surprise grabs people's attention
3. Concreteness - create clear mental images
4. Credibility - Make it easy for people to test for themselves
5. Emotions - Make people feel
6. Use stories
Tapper/listener experiment and the curse of knowledge: You need to present a story that makes sense to your audience, not just to you.
There is a syntax to creativity: Researchers studied 200 popular ads and found that most of them could be classified into 6 templates.
Focus down to the one most important point. e.g. the army's Commander's Intent is a straight-forward phrase that sums up the overarching goal of any plan. "No plan survives contact with the enemy".
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Sometimes extra choices can paralyze us. E.g. students will choose to wait to know an exam grade before deciding to buy a bargain vacation, but f they did know (whether they passed or failed), they would have gone anyway. Being presented with a choice, or more choices can lead us to seek certainty, either by not making a choice, or delaying.
Hoover Adams, the Dunn (NC) Daily Record's publisher focused on "Names, names, names" to make give his paper the highest penetration (112%) of any in the country. The focus on local content made it highly relevant for his readers, and his core message (on names) itself was sticky.
Jeff Hawkins, the team lead on the Palm Pilot, would carry around a small clay brick to remind everyone that the focus of the device was to be simple: Only do a few things, but do them well, and elegantly.