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 provides some exceptional insights into making your ideas “stick” in the minds of your customers.

I recently finished reading Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping by Paco Underhill. His company has studied the behavior of thousands of customers in many different settings, so I was hoping to find some new and interesting tidbits that could be applied to a craft business.

There are some books that are great to own, and there are others that are good to get on loan from the library. While there is interesting and useful information in Why We Buy, I’d say this book is a good book to borrow, and not necessarily a book you must have in your own library.

Here are a few quick tidbits that are described in more detail in the book:

What do shoppers love?
Touch
Mirrors
Discovery
Talking (stores that attract groups do well)
Recognition (being known and remembered by staff)
Bargains

What do shoppers hate?
Too many mirrors
Lines
Having to Ask Dumb Questions
Goods out of Stock
Obscure Price Tags
Poor Service

Among the interesting research findings presented in the book that you might apply to your craft displays are the following:

People slow down when they see a reflective surface.

People naturally reach right, so a good way to introduce a new product is to place it to the right of an established item.

If shoppers perceive an interesting item at the back of your store when they are standing at the front of your store (or booth) they will make their way back to the interesting item. Don’t make the back wall a “dead zone”; getting shoppers off the aisles and into your booth should be a big goal in your craft booth design.

Shoppers want to experience merchandise before they buy. Let them try and touch as much as possible. Money lost to damaged product that has been sampled or handled will be minimal compared with increased sales you’ll make as a result of letting customers experience your products.

It’s easier to sell up when products can be sampled. If a customer can feel the difference between your luxury body lotion and your basic body lotion, they can compare on factors other than price, and you’ll sell more of the luxury lotion.