Art and stickiness

I've always wondered why people bought art. I mean, if they got the tools, materials and other resources, they could do something very similar to what they could buy and it would be their own soul-children adorning their walls. Only in the past month or so, browsing Etsy, has it begun to really, truly dawn on me. There's a story behind it. People like buying art from an artist, a poet, who deals with the daily grind of life and still uplifts yours. I found that the pages of items I visited which had only the product and delivery specs were less appealing, as compared to those in which the story or personality of the artist - or indeed, the art itself.

In the book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath give great examples every chapter on how to improve your "Stickiness" with simple strategies. The most important being their coined,

"SUCCES" acronym:

S simple - don't lose your core message in a lot of pomp and circumstance

U unexpected - make your idea jump out and grab people's attention

C concrete - keep it easy to grasp vs. mind boggling statistics or huge numbers

C credible - is your idea believable?

E emotional - people react to emotion and it creates an empathetic bond

S stories - story telling is an age old form of communication

These kinds of strategies are useful to retain for anything you want to do, as it mostly consists of the best practices for sticking in the human mind.