The Repeatable Idea Test (Put the Pill in the Cheese)
Engineer a message people repeat for their own reasons — memorable, effortless, and never an inside joke.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 93%
Meservey's method for making an idea spread: make it memorable, and give people a selfish reason to say it — to bring joy, get a laugh, look interesting, or project identity. Nobody repeats a message as a favour to a corporation. The craft levers are jokes, analogies, repeated short phrases, vivid mental images, and stories instead of adjectives. The test is whether a second-grader could get it instantly with zero extra cognitive effort.
Origin
Lulu Cheng Meservey's own toolkit, taught in her comms newsletter Flack. 'Put the pill in the cheese' is her image for hiding your substantive point inside something people actually want to consume. She cites 'move fast and break things', 'don't be evil', 'build something people want', 'software is eating the world' and 'it's time to build' as canonical examples of the repeated-short-phrase lever.
Core principles
- 01People repeat things of their own volition, for identity, humour, or generosity — never as a favour to a company.
- 02Minimise the cognitive burden on the recipient: instant comprehension or nothing.
- 03Adjectives are subjective and meaningless; stories are repeatable at the dinner table.
- 04Unusual word order in ordinary words is what makes a phrase sticky.
- 05Stickiness is neutral — the same mechanics work against you ('binders of women').
- 06An inside joke with yourself is the single most common way this fails.
How to run it
- 1
Boil the essence down to one sentence
Reduce your company, mission or message to a single sentence. Out of the thousand facts in your head, you get one to three.
Watch out This is hard precisely because you know too much — expertise is the enemy of compression.
- 2
Rewrite it so a second-grader gets it
Turn the sentence into one you could explain to a second grader — no jargon, no domain assumptions, no cognitive tax on the recipient.
- 3
Cleanse it of cliché and common parlance
Strip every phrase that already exists in the ambient business language. Familiar wording is invisible wording.
- 4
Add an analogy or a vivid image
Convert it into an analogy or something with imagery — 'put the pill in the cheese', 'cultural erogenous zones', 'binders of women'. Meservey says at this point you are 80-90% of the way there.
Pro tip Take normal words and put them in an unusual order; that combination is what makes a phrase repeatable.
- 5
Run the inside-joke check
Ask whether the reference is instantly gettable by the audience or whether it only works because you would explain it to them. If it requires explanation, kill it.
Pro tip Test the line on someone outside your context and watch whether they get it before you finish saying it.
Watch out A vivid image you love but nobody else has context for will still catch attention — as a dud that stops your reader cold.
- 6
Replace adjectives with an anecdote, then repeat it
Wherever you were about to use an adjective, substitute a concrete story people can retell over dinner. Then say the resulting phrase over and over — repetition is part of what makes it stick.
In the wild
Mitt Romney's phrase caught fire because it is instantly picturable, hilarious as a mental image, and unusually phrased — the exact properties that make a message repeatable. It also happened to be a phrase he never wanted to spread.
→ It spread like wildfire and became a lasting joke — a caution that the same stickiness mechanics amplify a mistake as fast as a message.
Meservey deliberately coined a phrase that is instantly understandable without explanation, is not an inside joke with herself, and is unusual enough to be repeated. She uses it constantly.
→ The phrase became her signature shorthand, repeated by others (including on this podcast) and remembered without her having to re-explain it.
Common mistakes
Releasing an inside joke into the world
Meservey's esoteric New Yorker reference inside an otherwise successful thread produced a visible cliff in engagement — readers asked what on earth she was talking about.
Using adjectives instead of anecdotes
Adjectives are subjective and therefore meaningless to the listener; a story is what actually gets repeated at the dinner table.
Asking people to spread it as a favour
Doing a favour for a corporation is not a reason anyone repeats anything. You must supply an intrinsic motive: joy, humour, looking interesting, or projecting identity.
Manufacturing viral bait with no message
Recycled dunk-formats and screenshot jokes get low-value likes from random people, do not recruit followers who want more from you specifically, and do not deepen a meaningful audience.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and comms people crafting a mission line, positioning phrase, or launch thread that needs to travel without paid amplification.
Not ideal for
Technical, legal or precision-critical communication where compressing to a second-grade reading level would destroy accuracy.
From the transcript
“so there's a few ways to make the idea spread the overall principle is you have to make it memorable and you have to make…”
“you want to make it something that a second grader could understand like you want to minimize the cognitive burden on the recipient”
“so if you were to boil down the essence of let's say your company or your mission get it to one sentence and then turn…”
“and then the last thing is use a story use an anecdote instead of using adjectives because adjectives are so subjective they're meaningless to people”
From the episode
Navigating comms and PR
Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)