Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Before diving into the substance of this useful book, it makes sense to dwell for a moment on what inspired the authors to write "Made to Stick." Their ideas build on the work of business writer Malcolm Gladwell, specifically his well-known book The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell examined the forces that caused certain ideas to tip – that is, to suddenly be embraced by large numbers of people. Gladwell argued that in the modern world, mass media bombards people with all sorts of information and messages. But only a few ideas actually stick in people's minds, and those ideas convince people to change their behavior and take action. The authors of "Made to Stick" borrow Gladwell's language, and openly acknowledging their debt to him. But while Gladwell focused on how "sticky" ideas translate to action, this book examines how ideas become sticky in the first place.

As you would hope from communication experts, the authors have delivered a clearly written book with a logical structure. It opens with a chapter called "What Sticks?", which gives a broad overview of why some messages succeed and others fail. In that chapter, they introduce what they consider to be the key traits of effective communication.

According to the authors, successful messages share the following traits: They're simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and finally, based on stories. Each one of these traits is then turned into a chapter, forming the substance of the book. The authors call these traits the "six principles of sticky ideas." Conveniently, the first letters of these words spell, or almost spell, the word success. Thankfully, the authors acknowledge this acronym in passing without making too much of it. Business books that depend too heavily on acronyms can become tiresome.

But this book is anything but tiresome. It opens with quite a bang – the story of a man, a friend of a friend of the authors, who finds himself in a terrifying situation. Alone in a bar on a business trip, he meets an attractive woman who buys him a drink. The next thing he knows, he has woken up in the bathtub of a strange hotel room, his body submerged in ice water. Disoriented, he finds a note taped to a mobile phone nearby. The note reads, "Don't move. Call the police." When the man rings up the police, he's informed that a band of organ thieves are operating in the city – and that one of his kidneys has been stolen.

The authors quickly reveal that the story is completely invented. It's what's known in the United States as an "urban legend" – a false story that gets repeated so often that people begin to believe it's true. For the authors, urban legends are examples of ideas that stick. People believe them, and are moved to act – that is, to repeat the stories.

The authors bring up the Case of the Missing Kidney to illustrate an important point: that silly or bad ideas can, with effective packaging, be made to stick. In the same chapter, the authors quote from a non-profit organization's promotional text. In dry, complicated language, the organization asks for donations to a perfectly worthy cause. Unlike the kidney heist, the non-profit appeal is completely forgettable. It doesn't stick. For the rest of the book, the authors explain how to give good ideas and worthy causes the packaging they deserve. They make their case by extensive use of case studies and examples – and for the most part, the message sticks.

As you heard a few minutes ago, the book devotes a chapter to each of the authors' "six principles of sticky ideas."

The first principle, "simple," is probably the most important – and ironically, the most difficult to achieve. The Kidney Heist story certainly has the virtue of simplicity: A man wakes up to discover he's been robbed of his kidney. But real-life messages often resist brief summary. Yet simplicity is critical to creating a message that sticks. The trick, the authors advise, is to boil the message down to what they call its core.

To show how to identify the core of a message, the authors turn to an extremely complex organization: the United States military. For decades, military planners spent considerable time and money scripting precise battle plans, only to see those plans become useless in the heat of battle, because no amount of planning can predict the actions of the enemy. And that became a major problem, because with no solid plan to rely on, soldiers on the ground were forced to improvise without much direction.

Rather than stop trying to plan battles, the military came up with a new idea: identify and express the battle plan's core message. That way, during the chaos of war, field commanders and soldiers could improvise with key goals in mind. How did the military accomplish this? By building the idea of a core message into every battle plan.

At the top of every battle plan produced by the American military, there's now a single sentence called the "commander's intent." In crisp, plain language, it describes the desired outcome of an operation. It's a simple sentence that soldiers can easily remember amid the chaos of war. The plan itself may include an elaborate strategy for, say, taking control of a bridge. But no matter how complex that strategy is, the plan will be topped with a "commander's intent" reading something like, "The goal of this mission is to take control of Bridge X." The strategy will invariably need to be modified in the heat of battle. But every soldier will know that the ultimate goal of his actions is to take that bridge.

How, then, does the commander convey a complicated battle plan in a simple sentence? More important, how can we use the army's method for improving our own communication? The authors reveal that in the military, commanders pare down their plans to the all-important intent sentence by answering a simple question: "What is the one thing we must accomplish from this mission?"

This exercise, the authors suggest, can be used by anyone to hone a message down to its simple, compact core. Simplifying a message, though, doesn't mean dumbing it down. A military commander can still come up with a brilliant strategy for taking a bridge. But if he doesn't make it completely clear, up front, that taking the bridge is the ultimate goal, his brilliant plan risks being wasted.

Once you've distilled an idea to its essence, what next? Military planners can stop there, because they enjoy a captive audience. For everyone else, it still remains to make our core message compelling. In the rest of "Made to Stick," the authors concern themselves with just that. The next "principle of sticky ideas," and the book's next chapter, is "unexpected." In this bit, the authors suggest ways to grab attention by surprising the audience. To make their case, they turn to what's known as the "gap theory" of curiosity. According to gap theory, people get curious when a gap arises in their knowledge. Gaps in knowledge cause a kind of mental pain, an itch that must be scratched.

When crafting a message, many people make the mistake of simply laying out information, fact by fact. But this technique assumes that a knowledge gap already exists in the minds of audience members. Rather than focus on laying out information, the authors suggest that we focus on creating knowledge gaps – piquing people's curiosity so that they want more. And the way to do that is to come up with something unexpected.

The authors cite the example of Nordstrom's, an American department store whose business model depends on the quality of its customer service. Nordstrom's charges a little more than its competitors, calculating that customers will happily pay a premium if they know they'll be lavished with attention by Nordstrom staff. Thus Nordstrom's success relies on its ability to get a clear message to new employees: other companies say customer service is paramount, but we mean it. How to get the message across?

When people apply for a job as a Nordstrom sales clerk, they typically have a notion of customer service that includes obvious qualities like politeness and attentiveness. To give new employees a more expansive vision of customer service, the department store gives them an orientation packet that challenges their old notions.

In short, it creates a gap in their knowledge base and then fills it with a new understanding of customer service. For example, new hires hear about the Nordstrom employee who cheerfully gift-wrapped items a customer had bought from a rival retailer. Message: At Nordstrom's customer service is so important, that we cheerfully sacrifice short-term profits to build long-term relationships.

The next chapter, "Concrete," focuses not on a building material, but rather on the authors' third principle of sticky ideas. This one involves the importance of making abstract information as accessible – as concrete – as possible. An otherwise well-crafted message can fall apart if people can't form a clear mental image.

The authors tell the story of how children learn math in Japan, where the students typically outperform their American counterparts by a wide margin. Despite its image in the West, Japan's education system is not based on rote memorization. Rather, teachers in Japan commonly use concrete examples to teach abstract topics like subtraction. Rather than drill students with facts like three minus one equals two, Japanese teachers are much more likely to say something like the following: three kids are playing ball and one has to leave. How many are left? Once students understand the concept in concrete terms, teachers then move to a more abstract level.

The same principle can be applied to any communication. Even if your message seems abstract, the authors claim, you can break it down to a concrete level. "25 million Americans suffer from heart disease" is certainly a startling statement. But it's hard to visualize "25 million Americans." A more powerful way to put it would be "one American in ten," because everyone can visualize ten people in a room.

From there, the authors move on to their next principle of stickiness: the message must be credible. This one is easy to get hold of. Clearly, even a well-crafted message will fail if no one can reasonably trust the messenger. One way to gain credibility is simply to be famous and important. The authors repeatedly cite the case of former American president John F. Kennedy, who grabbed the world's attention in 1962 by vowing to "bring a man to the moon and back by the end of the decade."

That's a well-crafted message, and it caused quite a stir at the time. But let's face it: If your uncle had said the same thing, few people would have paid attention. How, then, do the non-famous among us gain credibility? Essentially, the authors suggest establishing credibility by finding compelling, concrete details and statistics to back up our message. Here's where the authors stumble a bit. The credibility chapter really ends up being an extension of the concrete chapter – the chapter's case studies and examples mostly concern ways in which messages can be made more concrete.

But that's okay – they certainly make the case that concreteness is important to crafting a strong message, and this chapter's many examples are generally quite useful.

The next-to-last chapter focuses on the power of emotion to make a message stick. This chapter will be of interest mainly to marketing and sales professionals. After all, emotional appeals are probably not the way to go when you're trying to convince your boss to give you a raise. Again, though, the chapter is packed with useful case studies that bring home the authors' point. For example, they contrast two advertising campaigns designed to convince people to stop smoking cigarettes. One came from a famous American anti-smoking group, while the other was produced by a major tobacco company as part of a legal settlement.

The anti-smoking group built its television commercial on a blunt emotional appeal. In the opening scene, you see a building, and the caption on the screen tells you it's a major tobacco company. A large truck appears, and young men begin to unload long white sacks marked "body bags." The body bags pile up by the door, and finally a new caption appears, asking, "Do you know how many people tobacco kills every day?" The answer is revealed: eighteen hundred. The commercial ends with that number set beneath a towering pile of body bags.

The tobacco company, meanwhile, produced a much different sort of advertisement. In this one, a man in a white coat, presumably a doctor, lectures the camera on the dangers of smoking. Finally, the slogan appears: "Think. Don't smoke."

As the authors point out, the advertisement follows many principles of a sticky message. "Think. Don't smoke" is an extremely simple and concise slogan. The man in the white coat suggests medical credibility. And so on. But the advertisement's complete lack of an emotional appeal prevents it from sticking. The authors say that months after the two advertising campaigns had run their course, a poll of teenagers revealed that 22% of the teens remembered the body bag campaign, while only 3% could recall the "think" campaign. In this case, at least, emotion trumped thought.

The next and final principle of sticky ideas is stories – the idea that couching a message in a story helps make it stick. Here, the authors steer away from the plan of previous chapters, in which they mainly use examples and case studies to illustrate their points. Instead, they take a brief but interesting detour into psychology. They highlight research that shows an interesting fact about the way humans experience stories. It turns out that when we get caught up in listening to or reading a story, our brains actually simulate the physical actions being portrayed.

The authors say that when people imagine a flashing light, a part of the brain associated with vision gets activated. By causing us to imagine something, stories are also causing us in some way to experience it as well.

What does all of this have to do with ideas that stick? Well, if our messages can spark our audience's imaginations through stories, then they're also likely to spark their memory – that is, they're likely to stick.

By and large, the authors have created a book that sticks. Cleverly using the very techniques they promote, they've managed to engage us in the process of creating a successful message. Marketing and sales people will likely snap up "Made to Stick," but anyone with something to communicate will find it useful as well.

"Made to Stick" by Chip and Dan Heath is published in hardback by Random House. That's the end of this episode of Book Insights.