Book Summary: Made to Stick - Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“When an expert asks, ‘Will people understand my idea?’ her answer will be Yes, because she herself understands.” – Chip & Dan Heath

Made to Stick explains why some ideas become popular, while others wither and die.

The book “Made to Stick” lays out the most important characteristics of “stickiness”; that is, what makes ideas “stick” in the mind, and how to make them work for you.

Once we know something, it’s hard to imagine what it was like to not know it. Psychologists call this the curse of knowledge. This ‘curse’ impedes our ability to share ideas effectively because it makes us believe other people share our interests and other people care about our ideas as much as we do.

To deliver messages people find interesting and memorable (despite not having our knowledge and experience), you need to modify your ideas to include the following traits:

Content Summary

Simple: What one thing do I want my audience to remember?
Unexpected: How can I make my message surprising and insightful?
Concrete: How can I make my message easy to understand?
Credible: How can I make my message believable?
Emotion: How can I make my audience care?
Story: How can I keep my audience engaged?
Review
About the author
Genres
Table of Contents
Overview
Review/Endorsements/Praise/Award
Video and Podcast
Read an Excerpt/PDF Preview

Simple: What one thing do I want my audience to remember?

In the 1992 US Presidential election, Bill Clinton was notorious for going off point. Clinton loved policy, and he wanted to address every issue that the country was facing at the time. But Clinton’s inability to prioritize policy issues made voters wary.

James Carville, Clinton’s advisor, got Clinton to stay on point by writing three phrases on a whiteboard for all the campaign workers to see. One of the phrases was: “It’s the economy, stupid.” The United States economy was in the middle of a recession and needed to be the central talking point of every interview. The message was simple and memorable.

What’s the main message you want your audience to walk away with? If you want your audience to remember anything you say, deliver fewer ideas. Two or three ideas are OK, but one idea is best.

Unexpected: How can I make my message surprising and insightful?

When a manager at Nordstrom’s (a retail store in the United States) wants to explain the importance of customer service, she tells the story of the Nordstrom’s employee who gift-wrapped items bought at Macy’s or the story of the Nordstrom’s employee who started a customer’s car in the middle of a snow storm.

“Tell them something that is uncommon sense.”- Chip & Dan Heath

Concrete: How can I make my message easy to understand?

When managers at Trader Joe’s (a grocery store in the United States) explains their target customer, they don’t say ‘upscale budget-conscious customer,’ they say, ‘unemployed college professor.’

Use concrete language everyone understands. Leave out the jargon. Stop trying to sound smart.

“The beauty of concrete language—language that is specific and sensory—is that everyone understands your message in a similar way.” – Chip & Dan Heath

Credible: How can I make my message believable?

When the directors of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (LLDE) company tried to convince a workshop of people that their core value was ‘diversity,’ the audience seemed skeptical. One of the audience members said, “everyone claims that they value diversity, but you’re a dance company. You’re probably filled with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old dancers, all of them tall and thin. Some of them are probably people of color, but is that diversity?”

Peter DiMuro, the artistic director of the LLDE, responded with an extreme example, “as a matter of fact,” he said, “the longest-term member of our company is a seventy-three-year-old man named Thomas Dwyer…” This detail—seventy-three-year-old Thomas Dwyer—silenced the skepticism in the room.” – Chip & Dan Heath

Make your message credible by telling extreme anecdotes with vivid detail.

Emotion: How can I make my audience care?

In 2004, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that people were more likely to donate money when they heard a message about a starving seven-year-old girl in Africa than a message about 3 million starving children in Africa.

When you tell a personal story about yourself, someone you know, or someone you read about, your audience can put themselves in their shoes and feels that person’s struggle and success.

“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” – Mother Teresa

Story: How can I keep my audience engaged?

“Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode…. (we) empathize with the main characters and start cheering them on when they confront their problems: “Look out behind you!” “Tell him off now!” “Don’t open that door!” – Chip & Dan Heath

The most engaging stories are mysteries that keep your audience wondering:

“What’s going to happen next?”
“How is this going to end?”

Review

Retention

Mega-bestsellers Chip and Dan Heath break down the components of ideas that stick, and offer suggestions for creating them.

In this New York Times bestseller, Chip Heath – a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business – and Dan Heath – senior fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) – offer an engaging guide to devising ideas with maximum “stickiness.”

The Heath brothers take as their starting point Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell’s use of “stickiness” to describe innovations that are likely to find an audience. They embellish and expand his concept using many of his familiar methods – anecdotes, historical examples, non-linear conclusion-drawing and, in some cases, padding otherwise insubstantial ideas.

If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules. CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Like Gladwell, the Heaths have a knack for the memorable acronym. They demonstrate how communication that is simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and story-based (acronym: SUCCESs) makes ideas easy to understand, act on and remember. The Heaths, accordingly, provide mostly practical guidance that is easy to understand, specific, engaging and motivating – in other words, sticky.

SUCCESs

Comprehensible and memorable sticky ideas influence people’s thoughts and behaviors. The Heaths insist you can craft a sticky delivery for ideas that matter.

Sticky idea creation has an arch-nemesis: the Curse of Knowledge. People in charge of designing a sticky idea almost always know too much already.

There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Academics and for-hire experts are the most likely to fall prey to this curse. Being subject experts, they’ve forgotten how little other people know and thus they default to associations that are lost on folks who don’t share their education, context or experience.

A Proverb

Keeping an idea simple doesn’t mean dumbing it down. Simplicity means stripping out details and subtleties until you reveal the idea’s essence. Present an idea succinctly, with elegance.

It is possible to create complexity through the artful use of simplicity. If simple ideas are staged and layered correctly, they can very quickly become complex. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Your sticky idea is, ideally, a proverb: simple, brief and profound.

Guessing Machine

The human mind, the Heaths note – as do many authors – pays attention to novelty and change. To get its attention, break a pattern by doing something different and unexpected.

If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Surprise occurs when your internal guessing machine turns out to be wrong. When you surprise people, they want to know why their expectations weren’t correct. Help people make sense of their surprise, and your idea will stick.

Concrete Language

Familiar, concrete, specific language helps people grasp an idea and retain it. If you use vague, general terms, people will interpret them subjectively or find them too heady. For instance, proverbs and fables use tangible descriptions set in recognizable contexts.

Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract…Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Concrete language derives from the senses – what you can see, touch, smell, hear and taste. People retrieve sense-related information more easily than they retrieve abstract concepts, so the more sensory cues your sticky idea invokes, the more memorable it will become.

Using concrete terms puts everyone – no matter their level of expertise – on the same footing, thus facilitating communication and collaboration. To get sticky, keep your vocabulary in the realm of the senses.

Authority

If someone your audience trusts, likes, admires or finds authentic endorses your idea, his or her credibility enhances your concept’s stickiness.

Statistics also can create credibility, not because people remember the numbers – they don’t – but because numbers create a visceral impression of validity, thus bypassing rational processes.

Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Use data to develop and test an idea. Never massage data or spin it to support a preconceived notion. Data offers your audience a way to verify a sticky idea’s claims for themselves.

Emotional Content

Emotional connection moves people to action. You want to transfer an emotional charge from something people already care about to your sticky idea.

The most basic way to make people care is to form an association between something they don’t yet care about and something they do care about. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

People respond to emotional appeals to their higher ideals or group interests. The Heaths explain that people make choices by calculating likely outcomes and picking the outcome that’s most valuable to them or by asking themselves how those who are “like them” – or like the people they want to be – behave in similar circumstances. When you invoke the identity-based mode, people might take action due to affinity instead of self-interest.

Stories

Telling a story can drive people to act. Stories provide concrete contexts for ideas and actions. People enter into stories as their brains create physical, visual, spatial and auditory simulations.

Stories are like flight simulators for the brain…Inside, we’re getting ready to act. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Exploit three plotlines: the Challenge plot – an underdog overcomes tremendous odds, exemplifying courage and perseverance; the Connection plot – people bridge social divides for the common good, evoking compassion and service; and the Creativity plot – a story of breakthrough solutions and innovations that inspire people to new approaches.

Internal Communications

Sticky strategic communication provides a common language for discussing problems and developing solutions.

The moral is implicit in the story, but the story is not implicit in the moral. And the story…is more likely to guide behavior. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

Make your strategic messaging concrete, story-driven and unexpected – that is, counterintuitive.

Stickier

Urban legends, celebrity scandals, product rumors and political lies are sticky. Debunking and fact-checking seldom unstick them.

We should fight sticky with stickier, meet Scotch tape with duct tape. – CHIP HEATH AND DAN HEATH

The authors suggest pivoting the discussion from the original idea to an even stickier, but healthier, more constructive one. Easier said than done, perhaps, but still proactive.

Review

The Heaths are seasoned, successful hands at the intellectual advice game and understand how to stretch a magazine article into a book, with only a few padded sequences. They have a knack for understated wit and for letting their amusing examples of people’s idiocy or gullibility stand on their own without excess explanation. Whether they can teach you to make your ideas sticky is another question. The Heaths offer a blueprint that reads well and provokes thought, but doesn’t quite provide the cognitive leaps that stickiness requires. It does, however, prove a worthy starting place.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath co-authored Switch, The Myth of the Garage, The Power of Moments and Decisive. Dan Heath also wrote Upstream; and Chip Heath co-authored Making Numbers Count with Karla Starr.

About the author

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. He holds a BSc in industrial engineering and a PhD in psychology.

His brother Dan Heath is an academic, consultant and founder of the publishing company Thinkwell, which takes a new, didactic approach to writing textbooks.

CHIP HEATH is a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California. DAN HEATH is a senior fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE). He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Heath brothers are the bestselling authors of Made to Stick and Switch. They write a regular column in Fast Company magazine, and have appeared on Today, NPR’s Morning Edition, MSNBC, CNBC, and have been featured in Time, People and US News and World Report.

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, and his brother Dan Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University. They have co-authored two other bestsellers: Made to Stick and Decisive.

Genres

Business, Psychology, Leadership, Self Help, Communication, Design, Entrepreneurship, Management, Christian Scientist Monitor, Interpersonal Relations, Marketing, Social Psychology, Social Sciences

Introduction: What sticks?
1. Simple
2. Unexpected
3. Concrete
4. Credible
5. Emotional
6. Stories
Epilogue: What sticks.

Overview

Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas—entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists—struggle to make them “stick.”

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits.

Made to Stick will transform the way you communicate. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures): the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice.

Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas—and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.

Review/Endorsements/Praise/Award

“Anyone interested in influencing others—to buy, to vote, to learn, to diet, to give to charity or to start a revolution—can learn from this book.”—The Washington Post

Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas—and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.

Video and Podcast

Read an Excerpt/PDF Preview

I INTRODUCTION

WHAT STICKS?

A friend of a friend of ours is a frequent business traveler. Let’s call him Dave. Dave was recently in Atlantic City for an important meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his flight, so he went to a local bar for a drink.

He’d just finished one drink when an attractive woman approached and asked if she could buy him another. He was surprised but flattered. Sure, he said. The woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinks—one for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remembered.

Rather, that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up, disoriented, lying in a hotel bathtub, his body submerged in ice.

He looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was and how he got there. Then he spotted the note: don’t move. call 911.

A cell phone rested on a small table beside the bathtub. He picked it up and called 911, his fingers numb and clumsy from the ice. The operator seemed oddly familiar with his situation. She said, “Sir, I want you to reach behind you, slowly and carefully. Is there a tube protruding from your lower back?”

Anxious, he felt around behind him. Sure enough, there was a tube.

The operator said, “Sir, don’t panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested. There’s a ring of organ thieves operating in this city, and they got to you. Paramedics are on their way. Don’t move until they arrive.”

You’ve just read one of the most successful urban legends of the past fifteen years. The first clue is the classic urban-legend opening: “A friend of a friend . . .” Have you ever noticed that our friends’ friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves?

You’ve probably heard the Kidney Heist tale before. There are hundreds of versions in circulation, and all of them share a core of three elements: (1) the drugged drink, (2) the ice-filled bathtub, and (3) the kidney-theft punch line. One version features a married man who receives the drugged drink from a prostitute he has invited to his room in Las Vegas. It’s a morality play with kidneys.

Imagine that you closed the book right now, took an hourlong break, then called a friend and told the story, without rereading it. Chances are you could tell it almost perfectly. You might forget that the traveler was in Atlantic City for “an important meeting with clients”—who cares about that? But you’d remember all the important stuff.

The Kidney Heist is a story that sticks. We understand it, we remember it, and we can retell it later. And if we believe it’ s true, it might change our behavior permanently—at least in terms of accepting drinks from attractive strangers.

Contrast the Kidney Heist story with this passage, drawn from a paper distributed by a nonprofit organization. “Comprehensive community building naturally lends itself to a return-on-investment rationale that can be modeled, drawing on existing practice,” it begins, going on to argue that “[a] factor constraining the flow of resources to CCIs is that funders must often resort to targeting or categorical requirements in grant making to ensure accountability.”

Imagine that you closed the book right now and took an hourlong break. In fact, don’t even take a break; just call up a friend and retell that passage without rereading it. Good luck.

Is this a fair comparison—an urban legend to a cherry-picked bad passage? Of course not. But here’s where things get interesting: Think of our two examples as two poles on a spectrum of memorability. Which sounds closer to the communications you encounter at work? If you’re like most people, your workplace gravitates toward the nonprofit pole as though it were the North Star.

Maybe this is perfectly natural; some ideas are inherently interesting and some are inherently uninteresting. A gang of organ thieves—inherently interesting! Nonprofit financial strategy—inherently uninteresting! It’s the nature versus nurture debate applied to ideas: Are ideas born interesting or made interesting?

Well, this is a nurture book.

So how do we nurture our ideas so they’ll succeed in the world? Many of us struggle with how to communicate ideas effectively, how to get our ideas to make a difference. A biology teacher spends an hour explaining mitosis, and a week later only three kids remember what it is. A manager makes a speech unveiling a new strategy as the staffers nod their heads enthusiastically, and the next day the frontline employees are observed cheerfully implementing the old one.

Good ideas often have a hard time succeeding in the world. Yet the ridiculous Kidney Heist tale keeps circulating, with no resources whatsoever to support it.

Why? Is it simply because hijacked kidneys sell better than other topics? Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as this false idea?

The Truth About Movie Popcorn

Art Silverman stared at a bag of movie popcorn. It looked out of place sitting on his desk. His office had long since filled up with fake-butter fumes. Silverman knew, because of his organization’ s research, that the popcorn on his desk was unhealthy. Shockingly unhealthy, in fact. His job was to figure out a way to communicate this message to the unsuspecting moviegoers of America.

Silverman worked for the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a nonprofit group that educates the public about nutrition. The CSPI sent bags of movie popcorn from a dozen theaters in three major cities to a lab for nutritional analysis. The results surprised everyone.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends that a normal diet contain no more than 20 grams of saturated fat each day. According to the lab results, the typical bag of popcorn had 37 grams.

The culprit was coconut oil, which theaters used to pop their popcorn. Coconut oil had some big advantages over other oils. It gave the popcorn a nice, silky texture, and released a more pleasant and natural aroma than the alternative oils. Unfortunately, as the lab results showed, coconut oil was also brimming with saturated fat.

The single serving of popcorn on Silverman’s desk—a snack someone might scarf down between meals—had nearly two days’ worth of saturated fat. And those 37 grams of saturated fat were packed into a medium-sized serving of popcorn. No doubt a decentsized bucket could have cleared triple digits.

The challenge, Silverman realized, was that few people know what “37 grams of saturated fat” means.

Most of us don’t memorize the USDA’s daily nutrition recommendations. Is 37 grams good or bad? And even if we have an intuition that it’s bad, we’d wonder if it was “bad bad” (like cigarettes) or “normal bad” (like a cookie or a milk shake).

Even the phrase “37 grams of saturated fat” by itself was enough to cause most people’s eyes to glaze over. “Saturated fat has zero appeal,” Silverman says. “It’s dry, it’s academic, who cares?”

Silverman could have created some kind of visual comparison— perhaps an advertisement comparing the amount of saturated fat in the popcorn with the USDA’ s recommended daily allowance. Think of a bar graph, with one of the bars stretching twice as high as the other.

But that was too scientific somehow. Too rational. The amount of fat in this popcorn was, in some sense, not rational. It was ludicrous. The CSPI needed a way to shape the message in a way that fully communicated this ludicrousness.

Silverman came up with a solution.

CSPI called a press conference on September 27, 1992. Here’s the message it presented: “A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings—combined!”

The folks at CSPI didn’t neglect the visuals—they laid out the full buffet of greasy food for the television cameras. An entire day’ s worth of unhealthy eating, displayed on a table. All that saturated fat— stuffed into a single bag of popcorn.

The story was an immediate sensation, featured on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN. It made the front pages of USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post’s Style section. Leno and Letterman cracked jokes about fat-soaked popcorn, and headline writers trotted out some doozies: “Popcorn Gets an ‘R’ Rating,” “Lights, Action, Cholesterol!” “Theater Popcorn is Double Feature of Fat.”

The idea stuck. Moviegoers, repulsed by these findings, avoided popcorn in droves. Sales plunged. The service staff at movie houses grew accustomed to fielding questions about whether the popcorn was popped in the “bad” oil. Soon after, most of the nation’ s biggest theater chains—including United Artists, AMC, and Loews— announced that they would stop using coconut oil.