Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die - by Dan Heath and Chip Heath

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The book 'Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die' provides a practical way to create ideas that are understood, remembered and have a long-term impact. It examines advertising campaigns, urban myths and compelling stories to determine the 6 traits that make ideas stick in our minds. The book is useful for crafting a compelling message, public speaking, marketing, writing and anytime you need to persuade people to listen, believe and act.

'Made to Stick' is written by the brothers Chip and Dan Heath. Chip Heath is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Dan Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University's CASE center, which supports social entrepreneurs. The book is based on the brothers' 10 years of study of answering the question; 'Why do some ideas succeed while others die?' Since its release in 2007, it has become popular with managers, marketers, teachers, ministers and entrepreneurs. Made to Stick made the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists and was selected as one of the best 100 business books of all time.




Summary and Key Learnings


What makes an idea psychologically sticky? The answer is SUCCESs:

  • Simple
  • Unexpected
  • Concrete
  • Credible
  • Emotional
  • Stories



Introduction - The Curse of Knowledge


"When an expert asks, 'Will people understand my idea?' her answer will be Yes, because she herself understands." - Chip and Dan Health
This is known as the curse of knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like to not know it. Our knowledge has 'cursed' us, it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others as we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind. An example that illustrates this is, one study tested a "tapper and listeners" game. In the study they asked a person to tap out the rhythm of a song and have another recognise it. The listener nearly always failed to identify the song. What happened, of course, is that the tapper sings the song in their head and thus thinks they have the right rhythm. However, the person hearing the taps cannot hear the song inside the others head and therefore has no idea of what the taps mean.




Simple

Sticky ideas are simple and short. They are often distillations of complex ideas embodied in a compact phrase. Simplicity is not just about using fewer words, shorter phrases or sound bites it is about:

  • Finding the essential core of our idea 
  • Sharing it in a form of a compact idea

Simple = Core + Compact

Tip - Finding the core: 
The goal is to strip an idea to its core without turning it into a silly sound bite. The hard part is weeding out unimportant aspects i.e. distilling to the most important idea at the core. Determine the single most important thing. The military uses a "Commander Intent" instead of a plan. For example, rather than details on how to take a bridge, the CI might be "take the bridge." Use the technique of the inverted pyramid from journalism: Tell the most important aspect first, then tailor it and add details. This forces prioritisation.

Tip - Sharing the core: 
The key to motivating others with your ideas is to use the core message to help them make decisions as they apply your idea. The essential part is to make the message compact and to have it imply a sense of worth or priorities about how to implement it. It needs to be both compact and profound. 

One way to do this is to tap into the memory of the idea's recipients by embedding schemas. (For example, it is hard to remember the letters J FKFB I, but easy to remember the same set arranged as JFK FBI.) In pitching a Hollywood movie a producer would describe it in terms of other hits such as Speed will be Die-Hard on a bus or Alien will be Jaws on a spaceship. One can use memory schemas to keep an idea simple such as, one could describe a pomelo as a "large citrus fruit with a thick, but soft rind", or as "a pomelo is basically a super-sized grapefruit with a very thick and soft rind." Another way to describe this is as a "generative analogy" that is, a metaphor that generates new ideas.





Unexpected


Sticky ideas are surprising and interesting. They grab our attention by defying our expectations. The first requirement for effective communication is getting attention, the second is keeping it. In order to do this you use the unexpected. Humans like to think in patterns, the key is to break these patterns. There are 2 parts to this principle:


  • Get Attention through the emotion of Surprise
  • Get Attention through the emotion of Interest


So a good process for making ideas sticker is:


  1. Identify the central message you need to communicate. Find the core
  2. Find out what is counter-intuitive about the message i.e. what are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn't it already happening naturally?
  3. Communicate your message in a way that breaks you audience's guessing machines along the critical, counter intuitive dimension. Then once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.

Tip - A key is to always use a mystery story, even in science. As scriptwriters have learned curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations. So the key is to open gaps first in presenting your ideas, then work to close them. Remember to give facts first. The local news uses this technique very well. They might start with "There's a new drug sweeping the teenage community - and it may be in your own medicine cabinet! A ‘radio that fits in your pocket’ (a pocket radio), like a ‘man on the moon’ both surprised and teased. These surprising and interesting ideas also made sense, it's not about randomness. It's about creating a 'huh?' moment and then a 'a ha!' moment. So look for knowledge gaps in people's minds and appeal to their curiosity in a surprising way.





Concrete


Sticky ideas are tangible, real and appeal to our 5 senses. Something becomes concrete when it can be described or detected by the human senses. One of the problems are, experts tend to get more abstract because they have so much knowledge. They tend to see the patterns and insights between details, rather than the concrete details. Abstract ideas are hard to understand and are open to different interpretation.

Tip - To help people understand and remember, we must make our ideas clear and concrete. Give a concrete context, provide memory hooks and create a “universal language” that everyone can speak. The power of being concrete is illustrated by the longevity of Aesop's fables. For some 2,500 years they have resonated and been remembered by humankind. They are a striking example of concreteness. For example, the story of the fox and the grapes ends with with the fox concluding that grapes out of his reach are likely sour. Hence the phrase "sour grapes" is fairly universally understood and appears in nearly every language.

For example don’t sell the soft hands, sell the hand cream. An attribute, hand cream is concrete. A benefit, soft hands is abstract. Don’t sell a concept, sell a prototype. Don’t sell with statistics, sell with examples. For example, people prefer to give donations to real people, not abstract causes. So make it real and avoid abstractions, metaphor, numbers and jargon. Use the senses and sensory language to paint a vivid mental picture. 




Credible


Sticky ideas are believable. They make sense and have proof to support them. What makes people believe ideas? We base it on authorities. If one can bring in a true authority then the problem of credibility is easily solved, but what if we cannot? This chapter focuses on how to create credibility when you don't have such authority figures. There are several ways to do this:

  • Anti-authority 
  • Concrete Details
  • Statistics
  • Sinatra Test
  • Testable Credentials

Tip - Use any of the techniques above to add credibility to your idea. For example, use an image of a dying smoker to ‘prove’ smoking is bad for you (Anti-authority). Or use rave reviews and popularity as proof you’re as good as you say you are. And let people try-before-they-buy to prove to themselves you’re worth it. Finally, use the ‘Sinatra Test (‘if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere.’) by deploying an extreme example to prove your worth (‘the makeup of make up artists’).






Emotional


Sticky ideas move us and evoke emotions. They make us feel something and in doing so they make us care. To make people care about your ideas you can do the following:

  • Create empathy for specific individuals. 
  • Show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about.
  • Appeal to their self-interest.
  • Appeal to their identities. Not only to the people they are right now, but also to the people they would like to be.

Tip - To make people care about ideas we can use any of the techniques above. Another important thing to remember is to try not to envoke so much reason such as using a lot of statistics. Get people to take off their Analytical Hats. For example, to illustrate the effect of emotion versus reason a group studied the effect of soliciting funds for starving children in Africa with two appeals. One appeal was based on statistics and the other focusing on a single named child. Of course, the latter won. The surprising part of the study was that any time reason was evoked the amount of giving decreased. For example if they used both the statistics and the individual child, giving funds decreased. Also, if they asked a person to do a simple calculation, not related to the charity, this also decreased giving funds. Once we put on our analytical hat we react to emotional appeals differently, they hinder our ability to feel.




Stories


A key to making an idea sticky is to tell it as a story. Stories encourage a kind of mental simulation or reenactment on the part of the listener that burns the idea into the mind. Stories usually automatically meet other criteria for making ideas sticky. They are almost always concrete, they are often emotional and have unexpected elements. The difficulty is to be sure they are simple enough. The hard part about using a story is creating it. The best way to use a story is to always be on the look out for them. Most good stories are collected and discovered, rather than produced.

There are typically 3 types of stories:

  • The Challenge Plot: 
This is the classic underdog, rags to riches or sheer willpower triumphing over adversity. The key element of the Challenge plot is that the obstacles seem daunting to the protagonists. E.g., Subway's Jared losing 245 pounds.

  • The Connection Plot: 
A story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap -- racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic. An example is the Mean Joe Greene commercial of the 1970s where he make friends with a scrawny young white kid. All connection plots inspire us in social ways. They make us want to help others, be more tolerant of others, work with others and love others.

  • The Creativity Plot: 
This involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle or attacking a problem in an innovative way.


Tip - For an idea to stick, it has to make the audience:
  1. Pay attention (unexpected)
  2. Understand and remember it (concrete)
  3. Agree/ Believe (credibility)
  4. Care (emotion)
  5. Be able to act on it (simplicity / story)


About Post Author

Hi, my name is Christine Calo and I'm a designer by trade who has an engineering background. I have an interest in design, technology and science which I like to read, watch and write about from time to time. This blog contains random ramblings of these topics and may tangent off to other topics. Want to say hello, you can contact me on: calo.christine@gmail.com

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