Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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.