The stickiness factor

The second most important concept in making things tip is what Malcom calls "The stickiness factor". The stickiness factor is a measure of how easily things are able to stick to a person's mind and infact is a hard thing to measure.

What makes an idea or a concept sticky ? If there is something that sticks to my mind, would it stick to your mind as well ? When we think of stickiness, do we think about the masses or just the few people who are gifted to make ideas tip ? When you come up with an idea, how do you know if it is sticky or how sticky it is ? I can bombard you with thousands of questions like this, but how about getting back to the mattresses ( as Godfather would say ) for now and focussing on the areas of immediate impact.

As I think about it, stickiness is not a radically new concept. Marketers have been putting their heads together for years to build a bait that would charm the unsuspecting shopper into doing what the marketer wants him to do. Some have been successful, some haven't, but for most part of it, nobody has thought of coming up with a metric for "stickiness".

It was only with the dawn of direct marketing ( reaching the customers directly through mail, telemarketing etc. ) that the concept of "stickiness" came into the forefront. Direct marketers would shoot mailers to the people on their list and the definition of success was very straightforward - "How many of the people that were mailed responded to the campaign ?". If the percentage of people responding is large, you go Hurrrrray !!!, if not, you get back to the drawing board.

In the realm of interactive marketing, building metrics for success and tracking them over a period of time is relatively easy. But every new media comes with its own advantages and disadvantages and internet is no exception to that rule. For an interactive marketer, the biggest problem lies in the size of the internet community - what is stick for some may not be sticky for others ? If there is an iota of truth in the law of averages, then the metrics recorded across all the users on the internet should cancel out each other and you would never be able to judge the effectiveness of an interactive marketing campaign ever. That is a problem big enough to mark the beginning of the end of interactive marketing.

Don't despair, not yet. The answer to this problem would not only make it insignificant, but would also pave way to one of the fastest growing areas in online advertising called "Creative Optimization". More details in a future blog.