Great ideas aren’t always successful. Often, even magnificent insights go unrewarded and wind up gathering dust in file cabinets.

At the same time, far less worthy ideas like rumours and urban legends spread like wildfire.

Take, for example, the recent panic in America regarding adulterated Halloween candy. Millions of parents worried that unknown villains were giving their children candy laced with poison or razorblades.

What they didn’t know was that the story was a baseless urban myth.

But why do stories like this spread so quickly? And why are they so hard to stamp out?

Quite simply, they share two key qualities: they are memorable and people are eager to pass them onward.

By taking advantage of these two principles, any idea can be designed so that it’s sticky and popular.

A few years ago in America, certain health groups wanted to raise awareness of the fact that movie popcorn – at the time prepared with coconut oil – contained extraordinarily high amounts of saturated fat, making it extremely unhealthy.

Simply telling consumers that a bag of popcorn contained 37g of saturated fat proved ineffective – the number was too dry and academic to stick in people’s minds.

So they tried something stickier:

“A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theatre contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings – combined!”

This vivid message stuck, spread, and eventually led to the replacement of coconut oil with healthier alternatives by all major American cinema chains.

Every idea can be presented so that it sticks.

It’s tempting to try to explain an idea as thoroughly as possible. But, when it comes to stickiness, too much detail is counterproductive.

Instead, cut the idea down to just one simple statement; any more detail will be instantly forgotten, along with the key idea behind it all. A simple statement makes an idea easier to grasp and understand.

This doesn’t mean an idea should be dumbed down unnecessarily – the art of simplifying is to encapsulate the core idea in terms that anyone can understand, without changing the meaning. Although this can be surprisingly tricky, it makes for sticky ideas.

Journalists have to master this skill to come up with good headlines that grab readers’ attention and convey the meaning of an entire article in just a few words. Journalists know a bad headline can prevent a great article from getting the attention it deserves.

A great example from the business world is Southwest Airlines’ slogan ‘THE Low Fare Airline.’

A catchy statement like this will stick. A complex comparative breakdown of their prices would be instantly forgotten and fail to make an impression.

A sticky idea must be simple.

The brain likes to save energy by running on autopilot whenever possible. This means it allows information to just whizz past unremembered. It does this by subconsciously paying no attention to familiar or expected things.

When confronted with the unexpected, however, the brain jolts out of autopilot and into manual control; the unexpected receives our full attention.

Imagine an airhostess giving the standard pre-flight safety demonstration. The frequent flyers on board know the script inside out and pay absolutely no attention. But if she were to suddenly break from the normal briefing and declare that whilst there may be fifty ways to leave your lover, there’s only one way off this plane, she’d have everyone on board listening.

It’s surprising just how quickly people come to ignore routine things. By presenting an idea in an unexpected or striking way, it gets the attention it deserves.

A sticky idea must be unexpected.

The two main challenges in spreading an idea are getting people’s attention and holding it. Making use of curiosity gaps can help to overcome both these obstacles.

People allow themselves to go through everyday life on autopilot because they believe, to some extent, that they know pretty much everything they need to know to get them through the day.

The most effective way to grab someone’s attention is to show that there’s something important they don’t know – yet. This immediately jolts them out of autopilot by creating curiosity gaps – empty spaces in people’s understanding that they feel a compulsive need to fill, even if they previously weren’t interested in the subject.

Detective novels are the perfect example of this, using tantalizing clues and red herrings to keep the reader guessing ‘whodunit?’ The curiosity gap technique is so successful that celebrity gossip magazines often use it several times on the front page; it’s proven to boost sales.

This is because the only way to satisfy the urge to fill the curiosity gap is by reading the rest of the story.

Curiosity gaps can only be created by something unexpected. Surprising facts and figures are great for this and are therefore a strong way of opening a successful pitch or presentation for any idea. For instance, ‘Why do 40% of our customers make up only 10% of our total sales?’ immediately sticks in the audience’s mind and makes them want to hear more about the main idea.

Curiosity gaps help make an idea stick.

People tend to express themselves in an abstract manner. The more we know about a subject, the more we couch explanations in abstract terms.

This is mainly because most people find it hard to put themselves in the listener’s shoes, or to ask themselves, ‘how does what I say sound to the other person?’

Here’s a classical experiment demonstrating this effect: a subject was instructed to tap out the tune of a given song (e.g., Jingle Bells) on a table with their fingers, whilst another subject listened and tried to guess the name of the song.

Although the listener heard only the taps on the table, the tapper also heard the melody in their head. Because of this, the tappers estimated that the listeners, on average, had been able to correctly guess the song 50% of the time, whereas the real figure was only 2.5%.

The problem is, people tend to forget that not everyone knows as much about a subject as they do, whether it’s a tune in their head or the details of an idea.

The same effect applies to verbal communication; abstract terms convey the message about as well as tapping on a table conveys a melody. Only by using concrete, understandable terms can we be sure that the message will be understood.

At the same time, it’s often helpful to give examples or use descriptive imagery to help convey a point.

Concrete, visually-descriptive expressions aren’t just easier to understand, they stick.

Concreteness means avoiding unnecessary jargon when speaking about real people or events. The retail worker hasn’t just ‘delivered outstanding customer service’; they’ve given a customer a refund on a shirt even though it was bought at another branch of the store.

The fox hasn’t ‘altered his tastes to suit his means’; he’s convinced himself that the grapes he can’t reach are too sour.

The more concrete and better described an idea is, the more likely it will stick and be passed on.

Sticky ideas are concrete and descriptive.