I recently read the book Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. While it’s not specifically a book about building a craft business, it includes a lot of really great information that can be applied to selling crafts.
The book explains what makes an idea “sticky”, that is memorable or interesting, and those concepts can be applied to all of your craft business marketing efforts.
According to Made to Stick, characteristics of sticky ideas are:
Simplicity – You must find the essential core of your idea
Unexpectedness – Be counter-intuitive, break people’s expectations, build interest and curiosity by opening gaps in their knowledge (make them realize they don’t know something they assumed they knew) and then filling those gaps
Concreteness – Express abstract truths, statictics, for example, in concrete images
Credibility – Allow people to test your ideas for themselves
Emotions – Find the right emotion to harness and make your audience or customers feel something
Stories – Telling stories will move people to action
All of these concepts can be applied to the way you speak about your items, the marketing materials you develop and the image you create in your displays, packaging and other branding materials. Because the book is about promoting ideas in general and not running a craft business specifically, you’ll have to take a bit of time to think through the ways each concept will apply to your business. The concepts will apply, however, and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
