If you want people to remember something, you’ll need to make it sticky.
If you see a cow today, you’ll likely forget about it tomorrow, and you almost certainly won’t talk to anyone about it. If you see a purple cow though, you’ll likely be talking about it for weeks. Purple cows are sticky.
Donald Trump did this in the 2016 election race when he branded his opponents, with the best example being “Lyin’ Ted”. This name was memorable for a few reasons (see the footnotes for the others), but the most interesting one was Trump’s use of “Lyin’”. Was it “Lying”, or “Lyin”? Wait, if it’s “Lyin’”, does it have an apostrophe? How are other people writing it?
This internal debate people had trying to parse “Lyin’ Ted” made the name stickier.
An important caveat: Making things absurd works only to a point. Had Trump called him “Flzftzldh Ted”, everyone would’ve forgotten about it. Things need to make sense to be remembered.
Tyler, the Creator is apparently aware of this principle. The first time I heard his song EARFQUAKE, I thought, “Shouldn’t it be spelled ‘ERFQUAKE’? No wait, that doesn’t make sense, because the original word is spelled ‘earthquake’ – the ‘A’ is supposed to be there. Still, it looks like ‘EERF-QUAKE’ the way he spelled it.” The “F” and capitalization don’t add anything semantically, but Tyler added them to make the title stickier (otherwise, he would’ve just called the song “Earthquake”).
Footnotes:
The other reasons “Lyin’ Ted” was memorable were: 1) branding someone in the way Trump did was uncommon in politics at the time, and 2) if you don’t know him or don’t like him, Ted Cruz looks like the kind of guy who could be a liar.
For a further discussion of influence strategies like “make things sticky”, check out Scott Adams’s fantastic book Win Bigly. I highly recommend it, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum.
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