Currently listening to a really interesting Podcast from the Stanford Centre for Social Innovation.  It is a talk given by Chip Heath, a member of Stanford's business faculty and one of the co-authors of a book entitled “Made to Stick:  Why some ideas survive and others die…” In this podcast, Chip Heath draws on the psychology behind Urban Legends to examine why some ideas become memorable. Urban legends are a really useful prototype for this research because by nature Urban legends tend to be very persistent and durable and they also tend to cross boundaries easily.  This is manna from Heaven for any serious marketer or influencer.  Within the Church, we have to be honest enough with ourselves about the fact that given the degree of “information noise” that people in our societies are bombarded with, we do want to influence people, we do want our message to be credible and memorable, and we do want our message to cut through the “noise” and “stick”. There are six basic attributes that will allow an urban legend, or your idea, to “stick” and be a SUCCESS.  They must be:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

For more on this, listen to the podcast and check out the book! A couple of the things really stuck (pun intended) with me from the talk.  One of them was that he described how Saddleback Church were really concrete about who their target person was that they were trying to reach.  Saddleback Sam, and Saddleback Samantha were two fictional characters that represent the profile of the typical person that they as a church want to reach. Because they have this “person” identified and profiled in such a concrete way, decisions happen automatically in order to further their organization's mission to reach such a person.  Does my organization have a “Saddleback Sam” identified?:

"Saddleback Sam" is a well educated young urban professional. He is self-satisfied, and comfortable with his life. He likes his job and where he lives. He is affluent, recreation conscious, and prefers the casual and informal over the formal. He is interested in health and fitness, and he thinks he is enjoying life more than 5 years ago, but he is overextended in time and money, and is stressed out. He has some religious background from childhood, but he hasn’t been to church for 15 or 20 years, and he is sceptical of "organized religion." He doesn’t want to be recognized when he comes to church. (Hunter, 1992, 155)

The other issue was that sticky messages have to be emotional.  The most successful anti-litter campaign in Texas occurred when they identified that male truck drivers were the ones causing the most litter.  Rather than raising fines, or having to police more, the organizers of this very successful anti-litter campaign capitalized on the Texan male’s sense of Texan patriotism by launching the “Don’t mess with Texas!” campaign.  By playing on their hearers sense of identity they managed to secure a much better outcome than by playing on people’s fear of retribution or punishment.  He makes the statement that identity is far more powerful than consequences and that it is far better to appeal to the hearers’ sense of identity and who they want to be than to threaten them with consequences.  WOW – what a message for us as a church.  Let the doomsday prophets take note!!!