Stickiness Factor

Biological Parallel

Poison dart frogs are neon yellow, screaming 'I'm toxic' to every predator. Peacock tails demand attention through metabolic expense. Alarm calls pierce through forest noise. Gladwell's stickiness factor is biology's costly signal principle: messages that spread must be worth remembering, and organisms prove worth through honest cost. Cheap signals get ignored; expensive signals command attention and spread through networks. Stickiness isn't clever marketing—it's the fundamental economics of information transmission in noisy environments.