Making Your Marketing Message Stick What keeps your message in the minds of consumers?

We only use 10 percent of our brains. There are alligators living in New York City's sewers. What do these two statements have in common? They're false, and yet you can't get them out of your head.

Chip Heath, a Stanford organizational-behavior professor, has spent years studying the qualities that give ideas staying power. He and brother Dan Heath are co-authors of the new book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
Chip Heath says there's plenty entrepreneurs can learn about branding their businesses from the persistence of silly urban myths.

Entrepreneur: In your book, you identify six qualities that help messages stick--they should be simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and tell a story. How can entrepreneurs best use these principles to create effective branding or ad campaigns?
Chip Heath: If you look at award-winning ads that make an impact, people are using a surprisingly small number of plots in those ads. They all boil down to creating an unexpected message.