Made To Stick: why come ideas survive and other die
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Rating(1-10): 8

Overall Summary

The book is an analysis of what makes us remember some ideas and not others.
It discusses the six things (in the six chapters) that make an idea "sticky".

Chapter Summaries

Introduction: What sticks?

Examples: the stolen kidney urban legend, the movie popcorn campaign
(more fat that three meals at McDonalds), razor blades in Halloween candy.
Acronym: SUCCESs: simple, unexpected, concrete, credentialed, emotional story.
The Curse of Knowledge: it is hard to put yourself in the place of the person
hearing something for the first time. Experiment with people tapping out
songs and others trying to guess them. Very low success but people think it
should be easy because they hear the song in the head.
Another experiment: a group studied good (had won awards) and bad ads.
They found 89% of the good ads fit into one of six categories, six simple templates.
But they could only fit 2% of the bad ads into these categories.
The then did an experiment where they taught people the templates and they came
up with much better ads. One control got training in a conventional creativity
technique: free association brainstorming. The group that learned the templates
did much better. Point: you can learn to make creative ads. They also think
you can learn to present ideas in a sticky way.

Kidney heist. Halloween candy. Movie popcorn.

Sticky = understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior

Six principles: SUCCESs: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories

The villain: curse of knowledge. It's hard to be a tapper.

Creativity starts with templates. Beat the Curse with the SUCCESs checklist.

1: Simple

Planning: detailed plans rarely work, what you need is a simple, concise statement of
what you want to accomplish so that you can plan on the fly as unexpected things happen.
Don't "bury the lead", start with the most important thing.
Simple = core + compact. Proverbs are examples of simple ideas.
Hollywood high-concept pitches: "13 going on 30": "Big for Girls", "Alien": "Jaws on a spaceship".
A "schema" is simple but it is like a toolkit, you can create complexity from it.
Good metaphors = generative analogies. Like Disney employees are "cast members".

FIND THE CORE.

Commander's Intent. Determine the single most important thing: "THE low-cost airline".
Inverted pyramid: Don't bury the lead. The pain of decision paralysis.
Beat decision paralysis through relentless prioritization: "It's the economy, stupid."

SHARE THE CORE

Simple = core + compact. Proverbs: sound bites that are profound.
Visual proverbs: the Palm Pilot wood block. How to pack a lot of punch
into a compact communication: (1) Using what's there: Tap into existing schemas.
The pomelo. (2) Create a high concept pitch: "Die hard on a bus".
(3) Use a generative analogy: Disney's "cast members".

2: Unexpected

Southwest's funny air safety announcements.
surprise gets our attention. interest keeps our attention.
To make an idea sticky: break someone's expectation machine and then fix it.
So something unexpected where they can figure out why they were surprised.
There has to be some logic in the surprise that you get at a second look.
Nora Ephron's journalism teacher: the headline is "No school Thursday" not
"Teachers attend a meeting on Thursday".
Keeping interest: tell things like a mystery, leave something for people to guess.
Make it a puzzle, create a gap in people's knowledge. They will want to know
what happened.

GET ATTENTION: SURPRISE

The successful flight safety announcement. Break the pattern! Break people's
guessing machines (on a core issue). the surprise grow: a pause to collect
information. Avoid gimmicky surprise -- made it "predictable".
"the Nordie who ..." "there will be no school on Thursday"

HOLD ATTENTION: INTEREST

Create a mystery: What are Saturn's rings made of? Screenplays as models
of generating curiosity. The Gap Theory of Curiosity: Highlight a knowledge gap. Use the news-teaser approach: "What local restaurant has slime in the ice machine?"
Priming the gap: How Roone Arledge made NCAA football interesting to nonfans.
Hold long-term interest: the "pocketable radio" and the "man on the moon"

3: Concrete

Give details, specifics, one person. Not abstractions. Concrete ideas are easier
to remember. Velcro theory of memory: give lots of details (hooks) so the idea
will stick to the many loops in your memory. Blueprints are abstract,
machines are concrete. Think of a single person as your audience.

HELP PEOPLE UNDERSTAND AND REMEMBER

Write with the concreteness of a fable. (Sour grapes.) Make abstraction
concrete: the Nature Conservancy's landscapes as eco-celebrities.
Provide a concrete context: the Asian teachers' approach to teaching math.
Put people in the story: accounting class taught with a soap opera.
Use the Velcro theory of memory: The more hooks in your idea, the better.
Brown eyes, blue eyes: a simulation that "cured" racial prejudice.

HELP PEOPLE COORDINATE

Engineers versus manufacturers: find common ground at the shared level
of understanding. Set common goals in tangible terms.
Our plane will land on Runway 4-22. Make it real: The Ferraris go to Disney World.
Why concreteness helps: white things versus white things in your refrigerator.
Create a turf where people can bring their knowledge to bear:
The VC pitch and the maroon portfolio. Talk about people not data:
Hamburger Helper's home visits and "Saddleback Sam"

4: Credible

HELP PEOPLE BELIEVE

The Nobel-winning ulcer insight no one believed. Flesh-eating bananas

EXTERNAL CREDIBILITY: Authority and antiauthority. Pam Leffin, smoker

INTERNAL CREDIBILITY

Use convincing details. Jurors and the Darth Vader toothbrush.
The dancing seventy-three year old.

Make statistics accessible: Nuclear warheads as BBs. The Human ScalePrinciple.
Steven Covey's analyogy of a workplace to a soccer team.

Find an example that passed the Sinatra test: If you can make it there,
you can make it anywhere." Transporting Bollywood movies: "We handled
Harry Potter and your brother's board exams. A business-friendly
environmentalist and the textile factory that actually purified the water
that fed it -- and yielded fabric that was edible.

Use testable credentials: "Try before you buy." Where's the beef?
Snapple supports the KKK? Coaches: It's easier to tear down than to build up:
Filling th emotional Tank. NBA rookie orientation: "These women all have AIDS."

5: Emotional

Mother Teresa: "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."
Appeal to self-interest: use "you" a lot, tell them how they will benefit.
Don't talk about features, talk about benefits. Spell them out.
Get them to visualize the benefits.
Maslow's "hierarchy": physical (hunger, thirst, comfort), security (protection,
safety, stability), belonging (love, family, friends, affection),
esteem (achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status),
learning (know, understand, mentally connect),
aesthetics (symmetry, order, beauty, balance),
self-actualization (realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences),
transcendence (help others realize their potential).
People too often concentrate on the level level but the higher levels are of
interest (self-interest) to people too. Appeal to people's higher interests.
Algebra as mental weight-training. Don't mess with Texas anti-litter campaign.

MAKE PEOPLE CARE

The Mother Teresa Principle: If I look at the one, I will act. People donate more
to Rokia than to a huge swath of Africa. The Truth anti-smoking campaign:
What made kids care was not health concerns but anti-corporate rebellion.

USE THE POWER OF ASSOCIATION

The need to fight semantic stretch: the diluted meaning of "relativity"
and why "unique" is unique anymore. Transforming "sportsmanship"
into "honoring the game".

APPEAL TO SELF-INTEREST (AND NOT JUST BASE SLEF-INTEREST)

Mail-order ads -- "they laughed when I sat down at the piano..." WIIFY.
Cable television in Temps: Visualizing what it could do for you.
Avoid Maslow's basement: our false assumption that people are baser than we are.
Floyd Lee and his Iraq mess tent: "I/m in charge of morale."

APPEAL TO IDENTITY

The firemen who rejected the popcorn popper. Understand how people make decision
based on identity. (Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people
like me do in this kind of situation?) Clinic" Why study algebra?
Don't mess with Texas: Texans don't litter. Don't forget the curse of
knowledge -- don't assume, like the defenders of the duo piano, that
others care at the same level that you do.

6: Stories

People like and remember stories. The do not listen passively but visualize the
story and put themselves into the story. This is why they are remembered.
Mental simulation is half as good as actually doing the thing. The same
parts of the brain are used. The important story plots for inspirational stories:

GET PEOPLE TO ACT

STORIES AS SIMULATION (TELL PEOPLE HOW TO ACT)

The day the heart monitor lied: how the nurse acted. Shop talk at Xerox:
how the repairmen acted. Visualizing "how I got here": simulating
problems to solve them. Use stories as flight simulators.

STORIES AS INSPIRATION (GIVE PEOPLE ENERGY TO ACT)

Jared, the 425-pound fast-food dieter. How to spot inspiring stories.
Look for three key plots: Challenge (to overcome obstacles), Connection
(to get along or reconnect), Creativity (to inspire a new way of thinking).
Tell a springboard story: a story that helps people see how an existing
problem might change. Stephen Denning at the World Bank: a health worker
in Zambia. You can extract a moral from a story, but you can't extract
a story from a moral.

Epilogue: What Sticks

xxx

USE WHAT STICKS

Nice guys finish last. Elementary, my dear Watson. It's the economy, stupid.
The power of spotting. Why good speaking skills aren't necessarily good
sticking skills. Stanford students and the speech exercise. A final word
about the Curse of Knowledge.

Remember how SUCCESs helps people to:

Simple helps at many stages. Most important, it tells you what to say.

John F. Kennedy versus Floyd Lee. How normal people, in normal situations,
can make a profound difference with their sticky ideas.