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From the January 23, 2007 edition of the CS Monitor - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0123/p15s02-bogn.html


Why some ideas stick and others don't



The 'stickiest' ideas – regardless of merit – have a lot in common. This book explains what that is.

By Michael S. Hopkins

On April 29, 1999, an article appeared in the Indiana Daily Student headlined "Indiana U. Senior Gains New Perspective on Life." You'll recognize the story. It profiled a 425-pound college kid who cut his weight in half by eating fast food. His name was Jared.

Part of the reason you know the story is that Subway – the place Jared got his veggie and turkey subs every day – turned it into an ad campaign that transformed Jared into an unlikely celebrity. (Possibly you can still picture him in his "after" version, stretching the 60-inch waist of his "before" pants between two widespread hands.)

But the Subway campaign alone doesn't explain the nearly viral phenomenon it triggered. There have been countless other ad campaigns since Jared's debuted, and none of them imprinted an unknown college student on the nation's memory the way Subway's did. Nor did many of them so swiftly and lastingly get their message across. ("Our food, though fast, is actually so healthy it can help you lose weight.")

Why not? What was it about Jared's message that made it – and him – stick?

Now, thanks to Made to Stick, we know. Coauthors (and brothers) Chip and Dan Heath – a Stanford Business School professor and an education entrepreneur respectively – spent a decade disassembling and trying to understand the inner workings of memorable, persuasive ideas, no matter what kind of packages they came in.

They studied political speeches, urban legends, news reports, management directives, and marketing messages like Subway's – not to mention culture-crossing proverbs, the various fables of Aesop, and the many soups of chicken (for the soul).

It didn't matter whether the ideas themselves were good or bad, just that they'd "stuck." (Not only is the Great Wall of China not the sole man-made structure visible from space; it isn't visible from space at all. And still...)

What the Heaths discovered was that the stickiest ideas, regardless of intrinsic merit, had a lot in common. Or, more accurately, the ways they were presented had a lot in common.

How to spell success

Each of these ideas, as conveyed, could be described using one or more of just these six à la carte attributes: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and story-containing. Line up the first letters of those characteristics, add a lower-case "s" (poetic license), and you've got the handy acronym SUCCESs. (Well, whaddya know...)

If that sounds like typical pop-lecture hokum (and it does, as the authors admit), it's not. What the Heaths have produced, complete with mnemonic handle, is a powerfully useful checklist for understanding how connections can be wired between ideas and people – between your ideas and the people you hope will be struck by them.

Why expertise doesn't always appeal

In separate chapters for each of the six principal characteristics, "Made to Stick" explores in depth exactly how, say, concreteness provides more hooks for recall (the "Velcro theory of memory") and why abstraction is often what unintentionally results from expertise.

"This is the Curse of Knowledge," the Heaths write, describing what they consider the single biggest reason so many messages fail to stick. "Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. [It] becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind."

The expert "wants to talk about chess strategies, not about bishops moving diagonally."

It's the showing, not the telling

"Made to Stick" summons plenty of brain science, social history, and behavioral psychology to explain what makes an idea winning and memorable – and the Heaths do the telling with beautiful clarity.

But they've also learned their own most important lesson: They know that with ideas it's not the telling but the showing that counts, so they've filled their book with stories that illustrate their theories.

"Made to Stick" deconstructs President Kennedy's moon mission challenge, the act of a biologist who drank a jar of ulcer-causing bacteria so he could persuade skeptics of his cure, and the way that the profound simplicity of Southwest Airline's core purpose ("be the low-cost airline") helps "employees wring decisions out of ambiguous situations."

Much of what they say may seem obvious – and yet the simple principles they propound are routinely ignored even by many who consider themselves professional communicators.

The Heaths discuss, for instance, what they call "the gap theory" of curiosity. This is the notion that a gap in knowledge is painful – it's like having an itch that needs to be scratched. It's also the reason that murder mysteries, crossword puzzles, sport contests, and even Pokémon succeed in grabbing attention: An audience is challenged to predict an outcome and then left wondering, "What will happen?" and "Was I right?"

But to capitalize on this kind of natural situational interest, the Heaths point out, "we need to first open gaps before we close them. And yet, too often, the communicator's tendency is "to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts."

Throughout "Made to Stick," the Heaths provide dozens of examples of sticky messages – and plenty of samples of ingloriously ineffective prose as well. They show how a badly articulated idea can be reexpressed.

An old-school self-help book?

That utility is what separates "Made to Stick" from the books it's indebted to – "The Tipping Point" and "Freakonomics" – books that proved the pop- crossover appeal of social psychology.

"Made to Stick," too, wants to unveil how people behave. Specifically, it wants to explicate what makes people care about the ideas they encounter. But then, unlike its forebears, it goes old-school. It emerges as a how-to book – very nearly a self-help book, whether for organizations or individuals – just like thousands before it, only far better. By mapping what makes others listen, it shows you how to make yourself heard.

I'm betting "Made to Stick" won't find as many readers as have its now-glamorous predecessors. But I'd also bet that the readers it does find will end up more profoundly changed by it.

• Michael S. Hopkins is a contributing editor of Inc. magazine.

A home on the web to encourage thoughtful, rich, and well-orchestrated execution in all things. "High amplitude" denotes a heady mix of (possibly disparate) ingredients, skillfully and admirably orchestrated into a new and amazing entity. Try your hand, or learn of others' examples here.

Maybe you've never heard about amplitude before. Maybe you think it has something to do with sound, or music.

It can, but it doesn't have to. It can apply to anything, in the sense that I'm about to explain to you.

One night, I was home alone, and reading the New Yorker online while I was eating. I started reading a Malcolm Gladwell article that he called, "The Ketchup Conundrum." (You can read the article here: http://tinyurl.com/687l8) You may also know Gladwell from his books "The Tipping Point" and "Blink."

Well in his ketchup article, Gladwell went on at some length about why ketchup was such an amazing invention. Ketchup, you see, cleverly (and perhaps inadvertantly) covered all the taste bases at once (sweet, sour, salt, etc.), even including "umami": a sense of protein, texture, or just a sense of higher complication. For example, babies, once they taste sugar-water, will ever after prefer sugar-water over plain water. You get the picture.

Along with Coca-cola, ketchup, it seems, has earned a famously high standing in the food industry for being "high amplitude": its creators struck a home run by skillfully orchestrating a panoply of elements into a peach of a product. Its owners now had a product that was so innately appealing, it would virtually sell itself.

All right. Well enough. And it was at least an appropriate article to read while I was eating, another of the New Yorker's "ain't-they-colorful?" pieces about a handful of quirky characters, bobbling about.

I wondered if I had any ketchup. (I didn't.) But I also started to wonder if I were frittering away yet more mind-space on a magazine article. Why bother to read a chattering piece about ketchup? And why did the article bother me so much?

Then I realized it: Gladwell hadn't followed the real gem in the piece. It was the umami, and the amplitude. He'd missed the most interesting angle completely, the thing that transcended the piece itself, what made it really relevant, even potentially life-changing for the reader.

The concepts of umami and amplitude could be applied to anything. Even people.

This, to me, was that rarest of things: a genuine epiphany. This was something really useful, even elegant. Mired as I was in a series of personal ruts at the time, I looked for ways to apply this new set of priciples.

I was doing a bit of sewing as a pastime, and decided to start with that. I needed a warm hat to wear to a camp-out. Aha, I thought, now I know what to do with that amazing, complicated, fuzzy, (and expensive!) fabric I saw downtown. The fabric already had umami and amplitude, I thought. I plunked down $30 for a yard of the stuff, and decided the best strategy would be to let the fabric do the bulk of the work for the piece. In riding, sometimes you need to get out the horse's way, and this was my hunch for this work.

Taking such a small task so seriously, and in such a multi-disciplinary way, seemed to work magic. When I wore the hat, people came out of the woodwork to talk to me about it. Strangers everywhere complimented it, asked to touch it, and wanted to try it on. They asked to buy one just like it. I took their names and ended up designing and sewing over two hundred more, making a bit of pocket money for the holidays, not to mention burning man.

Not only that, but the apparent high amplitude of the hats seemed verified by the fact that I received streams of unbidden stories back from buyers, about how strangers accosted them too, asking about the hat, wanting to touch it, wear it, buy it... from European ski slopes, to Washington DC, Japan and and Rio de Janiero, their stories were all the same: craziness over a bit of fluff.

But it was the idea itself that kept cycling through my mind, refreshing and inspiring me like a micro-portable insta-muse.

I normally work as a video editor and writer; I applied it to my online reel and got work. I applied it to my writing and helped improve the producer's video quality to a level that attracted much higher-bidding buyers, and moved tens of thousands of DVD's.

I applied it to choosing people, and became a more astute judge of character: potential employers, roommates, friends, and lovers - which among them had higher amplitude? And how could I improve mine?

And all without a guru.

I saw the principle nowhere else. I explained it to people, and they liked the idea, but that was taking a long time. Plus, I wanted to lay claim to its discovery, and maybe capitalize on it: doing well by doing good, as they say. (We can't all be Craigslist - I have to pay the bills!)

So as Mulholland might say, when he famously released water into Los Angeles, there it is, take it.

More on the concept as the blog evolves.

Have fun with it - and tell me how it works for you.