Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Dan Heath

  • • •

  MESSAGE 2: This message is from James Grant, who was the director of UNICEF for many years. Grant always traveled with a packet filled with one teaspoon of salt and eight teaspoons of sugar—the ingredients for Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) when mixed with a liter of water. When he met with the prime ministers of developing countries, he would take out his packet of salt and sugar and say, “Do you know that this costs less than a cup of tea and it can save hundreds of thousands of children’s lives in your country?”

  COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2: Quick: How solvable is this problem? What are you going to do tomorrow to start saving these children’s lives? Grant’s message brings you to the table, helps you bring your knowledge to bear. Maybe you’re brainstorming ways of getting salt/sugar packets to schools. Maybe you’re thinking about publicity campaigns to teach mothers the right ratio of salt and sugar.

  Grant is clearly a master of making ideas stick. He brings out a concrete prop and starts with an attention-grabbing unexpected contrast: This packet costs less than a cup of tea, but it can have a real impact. Prime ministers spend their time thinking about elaborate, complex social problems—building infrastructure, constructing hospitals, maintaining a healthy environment—and suddenly here’s a bag of salt and sugar that can save hundreds of thousands of children.

  Grant’s message does sacrifice the statistics and the scientific description that add credibility to the PSI message. But, as the director of UNICEF, he had enough credibility to keep people from questioning his facts. So Grant left the (uncontested) factual battle behind and fought the motivational battle. His bag of salt and sugar is the equivalent of Kaplan’s maroon portfolio in the venture-capital presentation: It helps the members of the audience bring their expertise to the problem. You can’t see it and not start brainstorming about the possibilities.

  SCORECARD

  Checklist Message 1    Message 2

  Simple -

  Unexpected    -

  Concrete -

  Credible     -

  Emotional

  Story -    -

  PUNCH LINE: This Clinic is one of our favorite before-and-after examples in the book, because it shows how powerful a concrete idea can be. The moral is to find some way to invite people to the table, to help them bring their knowledge to bear. Here, a prop works better than a scientific description.

  Making Ideas Concrete

  How do we move toward concrete ideas for our own messages? We might find our own decisions easier to make if they are guided by the needs of specific people: our readers, our students, our customers.

  General Mills is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of consumer products. Its brands include Pillsbury, Cheerios, Green Giant, Betty Crocker, Chex, and many others. One of the largest brands in the company, from a sales perspective, is Hamburger Helper. Melissa Studzinski, a twenty-eight-year-old from Michigan, joined General Mills in 2004 as Hamburger Helper’s brand manager.

  When she joined the team, Hamburger Helper had been in a decade-long slump. The CEO, frustrated by the decline, announced that his number one goal for 2005 was to fix and grow the Hamburger Helper brand. Studzinski, the newest person on the team, was eager to tackle the challenge.

  When she started the job, she was given three huge binders full of data and stats: sales and volume data, advertising-strategy briefs, product information, and market research on the brand’s customers. The binders were difficult to pick up, let alone absorb into memory. She called them the “death binders.”

  A few months later, Studzinski’s team decided to put the data aside and try something new. They made plans to send members of the Hamburger Helper team—marketing, advertising, and R & D staffers—out into the homes of Hamburger Helper customers. The idea was known informally as “Fingertips,” because the General Mills employees needed to have a picture of the brand’s customers at their fingertips.

  A call went out for mothers (the predominant customers of Hamburger Helper) who were willing to let strangers come into their homes and gawk at them while they cooked. The team visited two to three dozen homes. Studzinski visited three homes, and the experience stuck with her. “I had read and I could recite all the data about our customers,” she says. “I knew their demographics by heart. But it was a very different experience to walk into a customer’s home and experience a little bit of her life. I’ll never forget one woman, who had a toddler on her hip while she was mixing up dinner on the stove. We know that ‘convenience’ is an important attribute of our product, but it’s a different thing to see the need for convenience firsthand.”

  Most of all, Studzinski learned that moms and their kids really valued predictability. Hamburger Helper had eleven different pasta shapes, but kids didn’t care about different shapes. What they did care about was flavor, and moms just wanted to buy the same predictable flavor their kids wouldn’t reject. But Hamburger Helper had more than thirty different flavors, and moms struggled to find their favorites among the massive grocery-store displays. Food and beverage companies constantly push to develop new flavors and packages, but Studzinski needed to resist this push. “Moms saw new flavors as risky,” she says.

  Using this concrete information about moms and kids, the team convinced a diverse collection of people across the organization—in groups ranging from supply chain and manufacturing to finance—to simplify the product line. According to Studzinski, the cost savings were “huge,” yet moms were happier because it was easier to find their families’ favorites on grocery stores shelves. The insight to simplify the product line—along with other key insights concerning pricing and advertising—sparked a turnaround for the brand. At the end of fiscal year 2005, Hamburger Helper’s sales had increased 11 percent.

  Studzinski says, “Now when I’ve got a decision to make about the brand, I think of the women I met. I wonder what they would do if they were in my shoes. And it’s amazing how helpful it is to think that way.”

  The same philosophy is just as useful for ideas that are more transcendent. The Saddleback Church is a very successful church in a suburb of Irvine, California, that has grown to more than 50,000 members. Over the years, the church’s leaders have created a detailed picture of the kind of person they’re trying to reach. They call him “Saddleback Sam.” Here’s how Rick Warren, the minister of the Saddleback Church, describes him:

  Saddleback Sam is the typical unchurched man who lives in our area. His age is late thirties or early forties. He has a college degree and may have an advanced degree…. He is married to Saddleback Samantha, and they have two kids, Steve and Sally.

  Surveys show that Sam likes his job, he likes where he lives, and he thinks he’s enjoying life more now than he was five years ago. He’s self-satisfied, even smug, about his station in life. He’s either a professional, a manager, or a successful entrepreneur.

  … Another important characteristic of Sam is that he’s skeptical of what he calls “organized” religion. He’s likely to say, “I believe in Jesus. I just don’t like organized religion.”

  The profile goes into much greater depth: Sam and Samantha’s tastes in pop culture, their preferences about social events, and so on.

  What does “Saddleback Sam” accomplish for church leaders? Sam forces them to view their decisions through a different lens. Say someone proposes a telemarketing campaign to local community members. It sounds as if it has great potential to reach new people. But the leaders know from their research that Sam hates telemarketers, so the idea is scratched.

  And thinking about Saddleback Sam and Samantha isn’t limited to church leaders. There are hundreds of small ministries at the Saddleback Church: grade school classes, Mother’s Day Out programs, a men’s basketball league. All are led by volunteer members who don’t receive day-to-day direction from paid church staff. But these diverse programs work together because people throughout the church know whom they’re trying to reach. “Most of our members would have no trouble
describing Sam,” Warren says.

  By making Saddleback Sam and Samantha a living, breathing, concrete presence in the minds of the members of the Saddleback Church, the church has managed to reach 50,000 real Sams and Samanthas.

  Of the six traits of stickiness that we review in this book, concreteness is perhaps the easiest to embrace. It may also be the most effective of the traits.

  To be simple—to find our core message—is quite difficult. (It’s certainly worth the effort, but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s easy.) Crafting our ideas in an unexpected way takes a fair amount of effort and applied creativity. But being concrete isn’t hard, and it doesn’t require a lot of effort. The barrier is simply forgetfulness—we forget that we’re slipping into abstractspeak. We forget that other people don’t know what we know. We’re the engineers who keep flipping back to our drawings, not noticing that the assemblers just want us to follow them down to the factory floor.

  CREDIBLE

  Over the course of a lifetime, one person in ten will develop an ulcer. Duodenal ulcers, the most common type, are almost never fatal, but they are extremely painful. For a long time, the cause of ulcers was a mystery. Conventional wisdom held that ulcers developed when surplus acid built up in the stomach, eating through the stomach wall. Such surplus acid could be caused, it was thought, by stress, spicy foods, or lots of alcohol. Ulcer treatments traditionally focused on mitigating the painful symptoms, since there was no clear way to “cure” an ulcer.

  In the early 1980s, two medical researchers from Perth, Australia, made an astonishing discovery: Ulcers are caused by bacteria. The researchers, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, identified a tiny spiral-shaped type of bacteria as the culprit. (It would later be named Helicobacter pylori, or H. pylori.) The significance of this discovery was enormous: If ulcers were caused by bacteria, they could be cured. In fact, they could be cured within a matter of days by a simple treatment with antibiotics.

  The medical world, however, did not rejoice. There were no celebrations for Marshall and Warren, who had almost single-handedly improved the health prospects of several hundred million human beings. The reason for the lack of acclaim was simple: No one believed them.

  There were several problems with the bacteria story. The first problem was common sense. The acid in the stomach is potent stuff—it can, obviously, eat through a thick steak, and it’s (less obviously) strong enough to dissolve a nail. It was ludicrous to think that bacteria could survive in such an environment. It would be like stumbling across an igloo in the Sahara.

  The second problem was the source. At the time of the discovery, Robin Warren was a staff pathologist at a hospital in Perth; Barry Marshall was a thirty-year-old internist in training, not even a doctor yet. The medical community expects important discoveries to come from Ph.D.s at research universities or professors at large, world-class medical centers. Internists do not cure diseases that affect 10 percent of the world’s population.

  The final problem was the location. A medical researcher in Perth is like a physicist from Mississippi. Science is science, but, thanks to basic human snobbery, we tend to think it will emerge from some places but not others.

  Marshall and Warren could not even get their research paper accepted by a medical journal. When Marshall presented their findings at a professional conference, the scientists snickered. One of the researchers who heard one of his presentations commented that he “simply didn’t have the demeanor of a scientist.”

  To be fair to the skeptics, they had a reasonable argument: Marshall and Warren’s evidence was based on correlation, not causation. Almost all of the ulcer patients seemed to have H. pylori. Unfortunately, there were also people who had H. pylori but no ulcer. And, as for proving causation, the researchers couldn’t very well dose a bunch of innocent people with bacteria to see whether they sprouted ulcers.

  By 1984, Marshall’s patience had run out. One morning he skipped breakfast and asked his colleagues to meet him in the lab. While they watched in horror, he chugged a glass filled with about a billion H. pylori. “It tasted like swamp water,” he said.

  Within a few days, Marshall was experiencing pain, nausea, and vomiting—the classic symptoms of gastritis, the early stage of an ulcer. Using an endoscope, his colleagues found that his stomach lining, previously pink and healthy, was now red and inflamed. Like a magician, Marshall then cured himself with a course of antibiotics and bismuth (the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol).

  Even after this dramatic demonstration, the battle wasn’t over. Other scientists quibbled with the demonstration. Marshall had cured himself before he developed a full-blown ulcer, they argued, so maybe he had just generated ulcer symptoms rather than a genuine ulcer. But Marshall’s demonstration gave a second wind to supporters of the bacteria theory, and subsequent research amassed more and more evidence in its favor.

  In 1994, ten years later, the National Institutes of Health finally endorsed the idea that antibiotics were the preferred treatment for ulcers. Marshall and Warren’s research contributed to an important theme in modern medicine: that bacteria and viruses cause more diseases than we would think. It is now known that cervical cancer is caused by the contagious human papillomavirus, or HPV. Certain types of heart disease have been linked to cytomegalovirus, a common virus that infects about two thirds of the population.

  In the fall of 2005, Marshall and Warren received the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work. These two men had a brilliant, Nobel-worthy, world-changing insight. So why did Marshall have to poison himself to get people to believe him?

  Finding Credibility

  Let’s pose the question in the broadest possible terms: What makes people believe ideas? How’s that for an ambitious question? Let’s start with the obvious answers. We believe because our parents or our friends believe. We believe because we’ve had experiences that led us to our beliefs. We believe because of our religious faith. We believe because we trust authorities.

  These are powerful forces—family, personal experience, faith. And, thankfully, we have no control over the way these forces affect people. We can’t route our memos through people’s mothers to add credibility. We can’t construct a PowerPoint presentation that will nullify people’s core beliefs.

  If we’re trying to persuade a skeptical audience to believe a new message, the reality is that we’re fighting an uphill battle against a lifetime of personal learning and social relationships. It would seem that there’s nothing much we can do to affect what people believe. But if we’re skeptical about our ability to affect belief, we merely have to look at naturally sticky ideas, because some of them persuade us to believe some pretty incredible things.

  Around 1999, an e-mail message spread over the Internet, forwarded from person to person, claiming that shipments of bananas from Costa Rica were infected with necrotizing fasciitis, otherwise known as flesh-eating bacteria. People were warned not to purchase bananas for the next three weeks, and urged to SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION!!! if they contracted a rash after eating a banana. The e-mail also warned, “The skin infection from necrotizing fasciitis is very painful and eats two to three centimeters of flesh per hour. Amputation is likely, death is possible.” It claimed that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was reluctant to issue a general warning because it feared a nationwide panic. (One would think that disappearing centimeters of flesh might be sufficient to cause a panic, even in the absence of the FDA’s response.) This surprising message was attributed to the Manheim Research Institute.

  This bizarre rumor spread at least in part because it had an air of authority. It was circulated by the Manheim Research Institute! And the Food and Drug Administration knew about the problem! The Manheim Research Institute and the FDA are invoked as credibility-boosters. Their authority makes us think twice about what would otherwise be some pretty incredible statements: Necrotizing fasciitis consumes three centimeters of flesh per hour? If that’s true, why isn’t the story on the evening news?

  Ev
idently, someone realized that the rumor’s credibility could be improved. Later versions added, “This message has been verified by the Centers for Disease Control.” If the rumor circulated long enough, no doubt it would eventually be “approved by the Dalai Lama” and “heartily endorsed by the Security Council.”

  As the contaminated bananas show, authorities are a reliable source of credibility for our ideas. When we think of authorities who can add credibility, we tend to think of two kinds of people. The first kind is the expert—the kind of person whose wall is covered with framed credentials: Oliver Sachs for neuroscience, Alan Greenspan for economics, or Stephen Hawking for physics.

  Celebrities and other aspirational figures make up the second class of “authorities.” Why do we care that Michael Jordan likes McDonald’s? Certainly he is not a certified nutritionist or a world-class gourmet. We care because we want to be like Mike, and if Mike likes McDonald’s, so do we. If Oprah likes a book, it makes us more interested in that book. We trust the recommendations of people whom we want to be like.

  If you have access to the endorsement of Stephen Hawking or Michael Jordan—renowned experts or celebrities—skip this part of the chapter. As for the rest of us, whom can we call on? Can we find external sources of credibility that don’t involve celebrities or experts?

  The answer, surprisingly, is yes. We can tap the credibility of anti-authorities. One antiauthority was a woman named Pam Laffin.