Lulu Cheng Meservey on Making Ideas Spread, Cultural Erogenous Zones, and Going Direct

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Lulu Cheng Meservey on Making Ideas Spread, Cultural Erogenous Zones, and Going Direct
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Lulu Cheng Meservey on Making Ideas Spread, Cultural Erogenous Zones, and Going Direct

Lulu Cheng Meservey — Lenny’s Podcast · ~2023 · Source

Lulu Cheng Meservey, Executive Vice President and Chief Communications Officer at Activision Blizzard (formerly Head of Communications at Substack, author of the newsletter Flack), offers a practitioner’s theory of why ideas travel. She synthesises a decade of communications work into frameworks that apply equally to startups and $100B companies: how to make a message memorable, how to identify the audience that will amplify it, and why traditional PR is losing ground to direct founder communication.

Key ideas

  • Two conditions for viral spread. An idea spreads when it is (1) memorable and (2) something people want to repeat. The second condition is underweighted — people share things because sharing confers status or signals belonging to their tribe. Jokes, vivid analogies, and stories meet both conditions structurally. Abstract claims about market size do not. To test any message: would someone repeat this at dinner tonight?

  • Cultural erogenous zones. Every audience has topics that produce disproportionate emotional response — cultural pressure points where a light touch generates a strong reaction. The communication strategy that works fastest finds the erogenous zone of your target audience and builds a conceptual bridge (an API) from their pre-existing passion to your topic. Example: Substack’s messaging to journalists positioned newsletters as autonomy from editorial control — a live nerve for that audience. The message required no new belief; it plugged into an existing, intense feeling.

  • Concentric circles of distribution. Ideas do not jump directly from founder to media. The sequence is: employees → power users → influencers → journalists → mass audience. Each circle validates and amplifies before passing to the next. Skipping circles fails: journalists will not cover something they cannot independently validate; influencers will not amplify something their own community has not already seen. A startup’s first communications job is to saturate the innermost circle, not reach for the outermost.

  • Pressure = force ÷ surface area. To generate communications pressure, either increase the force (quality and urgency of the message) or decrease the surface area (number of people targeted). Startups with limited credibility and small budgets should decrease surface area radically: one journalist, one community, one channel — done deeply rather than broadly. The goal is saturation of a small, credible audience, not shallow reach across many.

  • Going direct is structural, not tactical. Founders who build their own audiences before they need them have a durable asset. Traditional media has declining reach and adds a layer of interpretation. A founder who writes directly accumulates trust and a direct channel simultaneously. The constraint is picking one medium and being excellent at it; spreading across six channels is worse than depth in one. LinkedIn is systematically underused relative to its professional audience.