How to make your communication messages stick

During this era of the digital revolution, customers are always bombarded with a plethora of contents, offers, and marketing communications from a business. As the average attention span of the netizens in the digital platforms is getting reduced day by day, service and product companies especially startups are trying to craft new and new strategies to get the attention of their target groups. The task is getting more and more challenging as customers tend to deviate from the communication message too quickly.

Marketing professor Jonah Berger from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania did extensive research regarding contagious marketing communications and formulated some interesting frameworks. One of his taught frameworks regarding “How to make messages stick” is SUCCESs.

It stands for Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, and Emotional Stories.

Let's break down the framework.

1) Simple:

There are many different ways to pitch a product. But here comes the ballgame in which way the information is presented. Telling people numerous features will split their attention. It’s better to communicate one or two from them, which they may remember for the lifetime. Readers may take inspiration from the 2008 MacBook Air envelope commercial as an example.

For your convenience here is the link of the commercial, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epO60K9FrXo

He also suggested to use analogy. Using analogy means rather than communicating numerous features of a product or service out of nowhere, giving reference of something that everyone knows and relating them with yours. Example: It’s like XXX but with YYY.

2) Unexpected:

Marketing people can also consider using an element of surprise. Doing something unexpected not necessarily means doing meaningless crazy gimmicks. Rather companies can set up a pattern/routine in their communication, open a curiosity gap, and then break that pattern in their respective communication. But marketers should be careful about the repetition because it can dull the surprise.

For example, see this communication regarding a mini-van, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-RvTSiu3vQ

3) Concrete:

Using concrete communication in an IMC is always important. Using sophisticated business languages, tech jargon is not concrete as it sounds because customers may fail to understand the terminologies and move their attention elsewhere. There is a simple hack. Before designing a communication, marketers should consider that can the target group visualize the words or not.

4) Credible:

In product/service digital touchpoints (say a landing page of a website where it will generate leads), testable credentials are important. The more reviews and credentials, the more are the leads. Marketers can also craft their communication or campaign strategies in a way that people can convince themselves in terms of using a product, service, subscription, etc.

5) Emotional Stories:

This aspect is often and sometimes always used in day to day IMCs which we encounter. The challenge is how can we get people to care. Marketers should keep asking themselves some questions like why are we bringing this product/service? What does it do? How does it add value to our consumers? Why they need value in certain pain points? And so on.

By keeping asking why and digging to the deep, marketers can find the right idea or topic on which they can design their communication. Hitting the ‘emotional core’ of the customers has always resulted in a positive impression of a company, and maybe, more sales.

This framework not necessarily emphasized that all five aspects are needed to be present simultaneously in a campaign or a communication altogether. Having the right mix from them, a little bit experiment and A/B testing can easily provide a crafted communication a huge leap forward, numerous traction, and organic results.