The Maloney on Marketing blog comes up with a lot of insightful information. I always learn something new and important.

I think that has to do with the author’s love for Malcolm Gladwell, and authors who take Gladwell as their inspiration. When you dig below the surface, you tend to find a lot of counterintuitive truth. When you find out that something actually works in a way counter to conventional wisdom, there’s usually a lot of gold in that insight.

Two such similar authors are Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick. The book is profiled in this Maloney on Marketing entry:

Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath is a book that I had been meaning to read for a while, as it is promoted as a great supplement to one of my favourite books of all time: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. The book revolves around six key qualities of an idea that is … Read More

via Maloney on Marketing

Some thoughts:

• Notice in the SUCCESS acronym that there is something that is very deliberately missing: logical argument. Or, for than matter, explanation of benefits. For all the focus we put on arguments for benefits, such arguments are useless for making ideas stick.
• Among other points, this book reinforces the notion of thinking in concrete images, even if you’re not working in visual media. There’s a reason landing on the moon is emotionally motivating, but curing cancer by the end of the decade is less so: you can see the former, but not the latter.
• For more information on sticky advertising, see Roy H. Williams (The Wizard of Ads).