If you travel to Seattle, Washington, you might want to visit the gum wall under Pike Place Market in the downtown district. You find the 50’ long sticky brick wall in Post Alley near the Market Theater. In the 1990s, some patrons of the theater were waiting in the alley and stuck pieces of chewing gum to the wall. Before long, other people started to add more gum to the brick, creating colorful designs on the wall. The Market District tried to stop the practice, removing the buildup of gum from the bricks. However, people continued to come to the alley to attach their chewing gum to the wall. After several years, the leaders of the Pike Place Market realized that their attempts to stop the gum rebels was futile, but they also realized that they had, through no effort of their own, a tourist attraction. Instead of stopping people from sticking gum on the wall, they promoted the site. Now it attracts people from all over the world, many who want to get a photo by the wall and add their own sticky artwork to the wall.

Every once in a while, dumb luck prevails in marketing. You stumble into something that draws people to you. However, most of the time it doesn’t work that way. So why is it that many businesses are hoping that they can take one simple act of advertising and it will attract people to their business who have money to spend on their product or service? Let me remind you that not everything sticks in the marketplace. So what does stick? There are three things: What your customers want, what your competition is not offering them, and something new. Let’s look at each of these items.

What do your customers want from you?

Meeting customer needs is the most important aspect of sales and marketing. If you ask your customers what they need, they will likely tell you. The problem is, most businesses never get around to asking consumers these questions: Are you getting what you want from me and, if not, what more do you want? This is not to be confused with prewritten opinion polls that artificially look like your customers love you. I recently had an encounter with a business that I felt cheated me. After swearing that I would never do business with them again, I received a letter asking me to take a customer satisfaction survey. However, when I opened it, it was simply a questionnaire to get information out of me for another product they were trying to sell. Not only did they miss the mark in the first sale, they totally misread my disgust with them and assumed I would buy from them again. Marketing stickiness begins with understanding your customers and giving them what they want.

Where is your competition missing the mark?

Don’t just assess your customers’ opinions against your own offerings, take a look at what your competition is doing as well. There is a big marketing opportunity when you can distinguish your brand from theirs by fixing their mistakes. How many brands have been built on fixing a problem no one else would dare try? Competitive advantages make for great marketing stickiness.

What’s new?

What is the fresh, new thing in your industry? We live in a society that chases after novel ideas. It is easy to catch the attention of the marketplace with the latest thing. You might not have a new product or service. What you do might not change as often as the wind blows. But other aspects of your business can be marketed as new. What is innovative about the way you are doing business? How has technology changed? How are you delivering your products and services? There are ideas that can be marketed as unique and cutting-edge without changing your basic product and services. Does something new always stick? Not if it does not meet the needs of your customers. The first portion of this stickiness test is always the most important. But if it does help them, marketing something new is very sticky.

You might know that back in 2015, all the gum was removed from the brick on the gum wall. All the amassed chaw for 20 years weighed over a ton! There was a public outcry over this act, but it didn’t take long for the wall to fill up with gum once again. The wall is steam cleaned every 4-5 years, and each time, people return to fill it up again. To the consumer, stickiness matters in marketing and on a particular brick wall in downtown Seattle.