Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Dan Heath

  1. Pay attention: UNEXPECTED

  2. Understand and remember it: CONCRETE

  3. Agree/Believe: CREDIBLE

  4. Care: EMOTIONAL

  5. Be able to act on it: STORY

  So, rather than guess about whether people will understand our ideas, we should ask, “Is it concrete?” Rather than speculate about whether people will care, we should ask, “Is it emotional? Does it get out of Maslow’s basement? Does it force people to put on an Analytical Hat or allow them to feel empathy?” (By the way, “Simple” is not on the list above because it’s mainly about the Answer stage—honing in on the core of your message and making it as compact as possible. But Simple messages help throughout the process, especially in helping people to understand and act.)

  The SUCCESs checklist, then, is an ideal tool for dealing with communication problems. Let’s look at some common symptoms of communication problems and how we can respond to them.

  SYMPTOMS AND SOLUTIONS

  Problems getting people to

  pay attention to a message

  SYMPTOM: “No one is listening to me” or “They seem bored—they hear this stuff all the time.”

  SOLUTION: Surprise them by breaking their guessing machines—tell them something that is uncommon sense. (The lead is, There will be no school next Thursday! Nordies gift-wrap packages from Macy’s!)

  SYMPTOM: “I lost them halfway through” or “Their attention was wavering toward the end.”

  SOLUTION: Create curiosity gaps—tell people just enough for them to realize the piece that’s missing from their knowledge. (Remember Roone Arledge’s introductions to college football games, setting the context for the rivalry.) Or create mysteries or puzzles that are slowly solved over the course of the communication. (Like the professor who started each class with a mystery, such as the one about Saturn’s rings.)

  Problems getting people to

  understand and remember

  SYMPTOM: “They always nod their heads when I explain it to them, but it never seems to translate into action.”

  SOLUTION: Make the message simpler and use concrete language. Use what people already know as a way to make your intentions clearer, as with a generative analogy (like Disney’s “cast member” metaphor). Or use concrete, real-world examples. Don’t talk about “knowledge management;” tell a story about a health worker in Zambia getting information on malaria from the Internet.

  SYMPTOM: “We have these meetings where it seems like everyone is talking past each other” or “Everyone has such different levels of knowledge that it’s hard to teach them.”

  SOLUTION: Create a highly concrete turf where people can apply their knowledge. (Think of the venture-capital pitch for a portable computer where the entrepreneur tossed his binder onto the table, sparking brainstorming.) Have people grapple with specific examples or cases rather than concepts.

  Problems getting people to

  believe you or agree

  SYMPTOM: “They’re not buying it.”

  SOLUTION: Find the telling details for your message—the equivalent of the dancing seventy-three-year-old man, or the textile factory so environmentally friendly that it actually cleans the water pouring through it. Use fewer authorities and more antiauthorities.

  SYMPTOM: “They quibble with everything I say” or “I spend all my time arguing with them about this.”

  SOLUTION: Quiet the audience’s mental skeptics by using a springboard story, switching them into creative mode. Move away from statistics and facts toward meaningful examples. Use an anecdote that passes the Sinatra Test.

  Problems getting people to care

  SYMPTOM: “They are so apathetic” or “No one seems fired up about this.”

  SOLUTION: Remember the Mother Teresa effect—people care more about individuals than they do about abstractions. Tell them an inspiring Challenge plot or Creativity plot story. Tap into their sense of their own identities, like the “Don’t Mess with Texas” ads, which suggested that not littering was the Texan thing to do.

  SYMPTOM: “The things that used to get people excited just aren’t doing it anymore.”

  SOLUTION: Get out of Maslow’s basement and try appealing to more profound types of self-interest.

  Problems getting people to act

  SYMPTOM: “Everyone nods their heads and then nothing happens.”

  SOLUTION: Inspire them with a Challenge plot story (Jared, David and Goliath) or engage them by using a springboard story (the World Bank). Make sure your message is simple and concrete enough to be useful—turn it into a proverb (“Names, names, and names”).

  John F. Kennedy versus Floyd Lee

  “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” Those were John F. Kennedy’s words in May 1961. An inspiring message for an inspiring mission. It was a single idea that motivated a nation to a decade of work—and an eventual, historic, unforgettable success. But here’s the thing: You’re not JFK.

  And neither are we. We don’t have an ounce of his charisma or power. We are less concerned with traveling to the moon than with, say, remembering our wallets when we leave home in the morning. So, if being JFK was what it took to make an idea stick, this would be a depressing book indeed.

  JFK isn’t the standard. In fact, he’s the aberration. Keep in mind that the same chapter where we first mentioned the “Man on the Moon” speech also contains a reference to the Kentucky Fried Rat. Our heads are not entirely in the clouds.

  Sticky ideas have things in common, and in this book we’ve reverse-engineered them. We’ve studied preposterous ideas: the kidney thieves and their ice-filled bathtub. We’ve studied brilliant ideas: Ulcers are caused by bacteria. We’ve studied boring ideas made interesting: the flight-safety announcement. We’ve studied interesting ideas made boring: Oral rehydration salts that could save the lives of thousands of kids. We’ve seen ideas related to newspapers, accounting, nuclear war, evangelism, seat belts, dust, dancing, litter, football, AIDS, shipping, and hamburgers.

  And what we’ve seen is that all these ideas—profound and mundane, serious and silly—share common traits. Our hope is that, now that you understand these traits, you’ll be able to apply them to your own ideas. They laughed when you shared a story instead of a statistic. But when the idea stuck …

  The SUCCESs checklist is intended to be a deeply practical tool. It’s no accident that it’s a checklist and not an equation. It’s not hard, and it’s not rocket science. But neither is it natural or instinctive. It requires diligence and it requires awareness.

  This book is filled with normal people facing normal problems who did amazing things simply by applying these principles (even if they weren’t aware that they were doing it). These people are so normal that you probably won’t even recognize their names when you see them. Their names aren’t sticky, but their stories are.

  There was Art Silverman. He was the guy who stopped a nation from eating obscenely unhealthy movie popcorn. He laid out a full day’s worth of fatty foods next to a tub of popcorn and said, “This is how much saturated fat is in this snack.” A normal person with a normal job who made a difference.

  There was Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher. Poor guy, we didn’t even mention his name. He told his class, “The lead is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’” And in that one sentence he rewrote his students’ image of journalism. He inspired Ephron—and doubtless many others—to become journalists. A normal person with a normal job who made a difference.

  What about Bob Ocwieja? No chance you remember his name. He’s the Subway franchise owner who served sandwiches to a fat guy every day and spotted a great story in the making. Because of Ocwieja the hugely successful Jared campaign was discovered and launched. A normal person with a normal job who made a difference.

  Then there was Floyd Lee, the leader of the Pegasus mess hall in Iraq. He defined his role as bein
g about morale, not food service. He got the same supplies as everyone else, but soldiers flocked to his tent and his pastry chef started describing her desserts as “sensual.” A normal person with a normal job who made a difference.

  And there was Jane Elliott. Her classroom simulation of racial prejudice is still etched in the minds of her students more than twenty years later. It’s not a stretch to say that she came up with an idea that prevented prejudice, like a vaccine. A normal person with a normal job who made a difference.

  All these people distinguished themselves by crafting ideas that made a difference. They didn’t have power or celebrity or PR firms or advertising dollars or spinmeisters. All they had were ideas.

  And that’s the great thing about the world of ideas—any of us, with the right insight and the right message, can make an idea stick.

  STICKY ADVICE

  I. TALKING STRATEGY

  Since the release of Made to Stick, we’ve had the chance to work with a lot of organizations, and we’ve been surprised to find that their external communications are usually far more sophisticated than their internal communications. Compare a typical customer with a typical employee. Companies spend millions trying to understand the Typical Customer. He is studied and analyzed. His whims are plotted and charted. Messages are laboriously tailored to his concerns and delivered to him via convenient media.

  Meanwhile, the Typical Employee receives a bland (but cheerful) monthly e-mail newsletter, which an unlucky HR employee hacked together in ninety minutes.

  We are being facetious, of course, but the trend is unmistakable: Customer communication is taken very seriously, and employee communication isn’t. And that’s a tremendous opportunity for organizational leaders. Employees need to understand what your organization stands for, where it’s headed, and what will make it successful. In other words, they need to be able to “talk strategy.” And if they can talk strategy back to you, you’ll benefit from insights that would otherwise be untapped and invisible.

  To see why the ability to talk strategy can be so effective, consider Cranium, the company that manufactures the hit board game Cranium and many other products. Whit Alexander, the co-founder of Cranium, recalls a time when he called a Chinese manufacturing partner to describe a concept for a new plastic game piece. The piece would be purple and made of multiple parts that would need to be glued together. His partner balked. “It’s not CHIFF,” he said. Alexander was astonished. His supplier, halfway across the globe, had just corrected him using Cranium’s own strategic language. And the supplier was absolutely right.

  CHIFF is an acronym that stands for “Clever, High-quality, Innovative, Friendly, Fun.” The CHIFF concept defines Cranium’s strategic differentiation in the extremely competitive board-game market. CHIFF informs decisions across the organization—from branding to package design and the content of individual questions. (Example: A suggested question for the game asked how many justices were on the Supreme Court. It was rejected for being insufficiently clever and fun to be CHIFF. So it was rewritten: “In which of these sports could the members of the U.S. Supreme Court field a regulation team, with no justices left on the ‘bench’?”)

  The Chinese manufacturer had chastised Alexander for his kludgy idea for a game piece. Glued together? That’s not particularly innovative or high-quality; the feel of the piece would be all wrong The manufacturer came back with design so smooth and novel that during a game players would hold spare pieces in their hand, turning them over and over just for tactile pleasure. Not only had the manufacturer improved the quality, he had also made a game piece fun. Alexander was impressed.

  This is a game-board manufacturing success story. More important, though, it is a strategy success story. The executives of Cranium developed a way to communicate a crucial element of the company’s strategy—the competitive advantage that makes it better than its competitors—in a useful, comprehensible way. “CHIFF” is simply a clear, actionable statement of strategic differentiation. Cranium employees, suppliers, and channel partners all use CHIFF to make hundreds of on-the-ground decisions that defend Cranium’s competitive differentiation.

  Let’s face it, there is no clearer proof that a strategy has been communicated properly than when a manufacturing supplier, in another country, with a different native language, uses it to correct the founder of the company.

  CHIFF works because it respects the principles that make ideas “sticky”—understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior. And these principles for creating sticky ideas can be used to transform the way strategy is communicated within a firm.

  Talking Strategy

  A strategy is, at its core, a guide to behavior. It comes to life through its ability to influence thousands of decisions, both big and small, made by employees throughout an organization. A good strategy drives actions that differentiate the company and produce financial success. A bad strategy drives actions that lead to a less competitive, less differentiated position. A lot of strategies, though, are simply inert. Whether they are good or bad is impossible to determine, because they do not drive action. They may exist in pristine form in a PowerPoint document, or in a “strategic planning” binder, or in speeches made by top executives. But if they don’t manifest themselves in action they are inert, irrelevant. They’re academic.

  It’s not a lack of effort or good intentions that renders a strategy inert. Every executive wants his team to understand. But there are three nasty barriers that make strategic communication more difficult. We’ll discuss them and offer suggestions for overcoming them.

  Barrier 1: The Curse of Knowledge

  If there’s one concept we wish we had emphasized more in Made to Stick, it’s the Curse of Knowledge. We see its effects everywhere. And, as in all the domains we discussed in the book, the Curse of Knowledge afflicts leaders when they try to communicate a strategy to the rest of an organization. It leads executives to talk about strategy as though they themselves were the audience. It tempts them to use language that is sweeping, high-level, and abstract: The most efficient manufacturer of semiconductors! The lowest-cost provider of stereo equipment! World-class customer service!

  Often, leaders aren’t even aware that they’re speaking abstractly. When a CEO urges her team to “unlock shareholder value,” that challenge means something vivid to her. As in the Tappers and Listeners game, there’s a song playing in her head that the employees can’t hear. What does “unlocking shareholder value” mean for how I treat this particular customer? What does being the “highest-quality producer” mean for my negotiation with this difficult vendor?

  Now, leaders can’t unlearn what they know. But they can thwart the Curse of Knowledge by “translating” their strategies into concrete language. For instance, Trader Joe’s is a specialty food market that carries inexpensive but exotic food. At Trader Joe’s, you might purchase some Moroccan simmer sauce for $2.53 or a quart of red-pepper soup for $1.99. Trader Joe’s describes its target customer as an “unemployed college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo.” The image is a simplification, obviously—at any given moment, there are probably zero of these “target customers” in Trader Joe’s. What the “unemployed college professor” image does for Trader Joe’s is this: It ensures that everyone in the organization has a common picture of the customer.

  A crucial element of every strategy is deciding which markets and customers a company will serve. The “unemployed college professor” speaks directly to this issue. Trader Joe’s could have referred to its customers as “people who are of high socioeconomic status and are quality-conscious but also budget-conscious, and who value variety and new experiences.” But this adjective-filled statement doesn’t provide as clear an image as the unemployed college professor. Would the professor like the red-pepper soup? Yep. The Curse of Knowledge has been thwarted.

  Stories work particularly well in dodging the Curse of Knowledge, because they force us to use concrete language. For instance,
FedEx has an award called the Purple Promise, which honors employees who keep FedEx’s delivery promise that packages will “absolutely, positively” arrive overnight. The Purple Promise award honors stories like these: In St. Vincent, a tractor-trailer accident blocked the main road going into the airport. Together, a driver and a ramp agent tried every possible alternate route to the airport, but they were stymied by traffic jams. Eventually, having run out of options, they struck out on foot, carrying every package the last mile to the airport, which ensured an on-time departure. In New York, after a delivery truck broke down and the replacement van was running late, the FedEx driver initially delivered a few packages on foot, but then, despairing of finishing her route on time, she managed to persuade a driver from a competitor to take her on her last few deliveries.

  These are not just interesting stories. They are tangible demonstrations—in vivid, concrete, on-the-ground terms—of the company’s competitive advantage, which is to be the most reliable shipping company in the world. Like CHIFF, these stories can work to inform decisions across the organization. A top sales executive can use the New York story to convey, “This is how seriously we take reliability.” A new delivery driver can use the story as a guide to behavior: “My job is not to drive a route and go home at 5 P.M.; my job is to get packages delivered any way I can.” An operations person can use the story to make better decisions about maintenance contracts—for example, it’s worth negotiating for the fastest possible maintenance cycles on delivery trucks.