In our overstimulated and distracted society, great ideas and important messages often fail to gain traction, while bad ideas and falsehoods, such as urban legends, go viral and seem to stick around forever.
Made to Stick by brothers Chip and Dan Heath explores what makes some messages “stick” in the public’s consciousness while others go unheard or unremembered and explains how to create an idea that sticks. Based on a wide-ranging examination of psychology research, popular culture, and news headlines, they identify six criteria for shaping your message so it resonates.
You don’t have to be a great speaker to communicate your idea effectively—the authors show you what to do through numerous examples of messages that have succeeded and others that have bombed. Rather than sweating over an original presentation, you can follow their “stickiness” template or even emulate someone else’s idea that worked.
Ideas or messages that stick are those that are understandable, memorable, and have a lasting impact. An example of a story that succeeds on all three levels is the perennial Halloween candy tampering scare.
Poisoned candy rumors originated in the 1960s, followed later by stories about sick people putting sharp objects into apples at Halloween. Parents searched their kids’ candy, schools and fire departments offered “safe” Halloween events, and hospitals offered to X-ray kids’ treat bags. But it was largely false. The story was understandable and memorable, and it had a lasting impact: it changed people’s behavior, even to today.
With all of the ideas, especially false ones, competing for people’s attention, getting important messages across is daunting. We all have messages and ideas we need to deliver. For instance, teachers must explain mitosis or introduce algebra to students, and managers have to get employees to implement company initiatives. But any idea can be designed in a way that makes it memorable by following a simple formula—SUCCESs: Make it Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and make it a Story.
Making a message simple means distilling it to its central point or essence by cutting away nonessential information, like getting to the core of an apple. In addition to being simple, a distilled message must be meaningful. Proverbs are a good example of simple, profound messages, as is the Golden Rule.
Tips:
A sticky message gets people’s attention by defying expectations. For example, an airline flight attendant got passengers’ attention with her flight safety lecture by turning it into a comedy routine: “As the song goes, there might be fifty ways to leave your lover, but there are only six ways to leave this aircraft.”
Tips:
Ideas must be concrete in order to stick. For example, the idea of apples with razor blades in them is concrete. In contrast, many messages in business are ambiguous and no one interprets them the same way. The abstract must be made concrete so that it means the same thing to everyone, like the proverb, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
Tip:
To be believable, sticky ideas must have external credibility (an authoritative spokesperson or source) and internal credibility, which means they’re supported by details, data, or a compelling example that clinches the argument. For example, a series of anti-smoking ads in the 1990s was credible because the ads had an authoritative spokeswoman: Pam Laffin, a 29-year-old mother who suffered devastating effects from smoking.
Tips:
To get an idea to stick, you need to get people to care about it. To make them care, you arouse emotions—you make them feel. The Halloween candy tampering message generated fear. Nonprofit organizations seeking donations generate emotions by showing you people—here’s a starving child named Rokia—rather than presenting abstractions such as statistics. The trick is determining what emotion you want to generate.
Tips:
Telling stories is the best way to make a message memorable and get people to act on it. Stories motivate people to act through inspiration. But more importantly, they tell people how to act—stories are simulations in which listeners think through what they’d do in the same situation. They’re mental flight simulators. For instance, firefighters and medical personnel can learn how to respond to crises from the stories of colleagues.
Tip:
Anyone can apply these six principles to craft a sticky message—they’re mostly common sense—yet a majority of people produce opaque, mind-numbing prose instead. The reason people don’t take simple steps to make their messages compelling is that they’re blinded by a cognitive bias known as “the curse of knowledge.” Instead of keeping their message simple and concrete, they lapse into abstractions because they assume their listeners have the same level of knowledge or expertise as they do.
Here’s how one potentially dull message was shaped and communicated effectively.
In 1992, the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest analyzed the ingredients of movie theater popcorn. A medium-sized serving had 37 grams of saturated fat, compared to the USDA’s recommendation that people consume no more than 20 grams a day. CSPI’s challenge was to put the numbers into a meaningful context—to make the message stick that movie popcorn is very unhealthy.
The organization called a press conference at which they displayed a serving of movie popcorn juxtaposed with three meals: a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac-and-fries lunch, and a complete steak dinner. The message: One serving of movie popcorn has more saturated fat than a day's worth of high-fat meals. The story caught the attention of the major television networks and newspapers as well as late-night comedians.
CSPI had an important message, they communicated it so that people would hear and care about it, and the message stuck. They did it despite lacking a sensational topic, a multimillion-dollar budget, or a staff of professional marketers. You can craft equally effective messages.
In our overstimulated and distracted society, great ideas and important messages often fail to gain traction, while bad ideas and falsehoods such as urban legends go viral and seem to stick around forever.
Made to Stick by brothers Chip and Dan Heath explores what makes some messages “stick” in the public’s consciousness while others go unheard or unremembered and explains how to create an idea that sticks. Chip is a professor at Stanford and Dan is senior fellow at Duke University. Based on a wide-ranging examination of psychology research, popular culture, and news headlines, they identify six criteria for shaping your message so it resonates.
You don’t have to be a great speaker or be particularly creative to communicate effectively. Rather than sweating over an original presentation, you can follow the book’s “stickiness” template or even emulate someone else’s idea that worked.
Some ideas naturally grab you—they’re inherently interesting. Others don’t—they seem to be inherently boring. But in a version of the nature versus nurture argument, the authors contend that most ideas and messages—even naturally less-than-thrilling ones – can be nurtured or designed for success.
Here’s an example of a story with staying power. In a city near you, a traveling businessman has a drink with a woman in a bar and blacks out. He wakes up in a hotel bathtub full of ice. He spots a note at eye level that says, “Don’t move, call 911.” His cell phone is beside him and, in a panicked state, he calls. The operator asks him to carefully check to see if there’s a tube sticking out of his back. When he finds one, she tells him he’s been the victim of a kidney harvesting ring and she’s sending the paramedics.
This story is an urban legend with countless versions differing only in the “local” details, such as the city where the incident took place. It’s so “sticky” or memorable that it’s been around for decades —and if you waited an hour and then called a friend, you could easily repeat the story.
Contrast the kidney heist story with a message from a nonprofit organization that begins, “Comprehensive community-building lends itself to a return-on-investment rationale…”. Anyone would be hard-pressed to remember and repeat it after even a few seconds. Such communications are the norm in many workplaces. They can’t compete with the kidney heist story in interest, but could well be the type of message you’re tasked to deliver.
You’ll find plenty of advice for successful communication: Start with a joke. Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it, then tell them what you told them. Or, make sure you understand your audience and tailor your message accordingly. But these tips don’t help you create and shape your message so that it sticks.
We all have messages and ideas we need to deliver, but often struggle to get them across. For instance:
With all of the messages, especially false ones, competing for people’s attention, getting necessary messages across is daunting. Yet even an idea less riveting than the kidney heist story can be designed in a way that makes it memorable.
For example, in 1992, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit group that educates the public on nutrition, analyzed the ingredients of movie theater popcorn. Its testing showed that a medium-sized serving of popcorn had 37 grams of saturated fat, compared to the USDA’s recommendation that people consume no more than 20 grams a day. At the time, movie popcorn typically was made with coconut oil, which had advantages over other oils but was also higher in saturated fat. CSPI’s challenge was to put the numbers into some kind of meaningful context and present them in a memorable way. They had to make the message—movie popcorn is very unhealthy—stick.
The organization called a press conference at which they displayed a medium serving of movie popcorn juxtaposed with three meals: a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac-and-fries lunch, and a complete steak dinner. The message: One serving of movie popcorn has more saturated fat than a full day's worth of high-fat meals. The story caught the attention of the major television networks and newspapers as well as late-night comedians. As a result, moviegoers shunned popcorn until the biggest theater chains announced they would stop using coconut oil.
CSPI had an important message to share, they came up with a way to communicate it so that people would hear and care about it, and the message resonated or stuck. They did it despite lacking a sensational topic, a multimillion-dollar budget, or a staff of professional marketers. You can craft equally effective messages.
Ideas or messages that stick are understandable, memorable, and have a lasting impact. Here’s an example of a story that succeeds on all three levels: the Halloween candy tampering scare story.
Like the kidney heist story, it’s also false. But it’s indelibly changed how society functions. Poisoned candy rumors originated in the 1960s, followed later by stories about sick people putting sharp objects in apples at Halloween. Parents searched their kids’ candy, schools and fire departments offered safe Halloween events, and hospitals offered to X-ray kids’ treats. It even led to several state laws with penalties for candy tampering. But researchers in 1985 couldn’t find any instance, even going back to 1958, of a stranger causing life-threatening harm to a child by tampering with Halloween treats.
The story was understandable and memorable, so it had a lasting impact, even though it was false: it changed people’s behavior, even to today.
(Shortform note: The original candy tampering scare story was false, but it’s evolved into some real instances of tampering, although they remain rare. The greater danger to trick-or-treaters today is getting hit by a car.)
Other urban legends continue to get traction, although with less tangible impact than the Halloween tampering story. They include assertions that:
(Shortform note: The explosion of social media since 2007, when this book was published, continues to fuel the spread of hoaxes and false stories like the above. But it’s also provided easy ways to check a sticky story’s veracity, for those who make the effort to do so.)
The Halloween scare story and the movie popcorn message share key traits:
The kidney heist story also has elements of the unexpected, has concrete images and details, and generates horror and other emotions. Other forms of successful communication share these traits, which can be codified into six principles for making an idea stick. They spell the acronym SUCCESs—Sticky ideas are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and tell Stories.
An idea doesn’t have to apply all of the principles to stick, nor does applying all of them guarantee stickiness. But they’re a useful guide, not only for shaping your ideas, but for spotting naturally sticky ideas you can use. Here’s an overview (a full chapter is devoted to further exploration of each principle).
1) Simple: To make a message or idea simple means distilling it to its central point or essence by cutting away nonessential information, like getting to the core of an apple. Making an idea simple isn’t enough—it must be both simple and meaningful. Proverbs are a good example, as is the Golden Rule, a sentence that you could spend your life putting into practice.
2) Unexpected: A sticky message surprises people by defying expectations. While surprise gets an audience’s attention, however, it doesn’t last. To hold attention, use the unexpected to also generate curiosity and interest.
3) Concrete: Ideas must be concrete in order to stick: think of apples with razor blades in them or a buffet of fatty food versus a single bag of popcorn. In contrast, many messages in business are ambiguous and no one interprets them the same way. The abstract must be made concrete so that it means the same thing to everyone, like the proverb, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
4) Credible: To be credible, sticky ideas must have external credibility (an authoritative spokesperson or source) and internal credibility, which means they’re supported by details, data presented in an accessible way, a compelling example, or a way for the audience to verify the message (try before you buy). For example, instead of presenting statistics on the lagging economy in 1980, then-candidate Ronald Reagan suggested a self-test, “Before you vote, ask yourself if you’re better off today than you were four years ago.”
5) Emotional: To get an idea to stick, you need to get people to care about it. To make them care, you arouse emotions—you make them feel. The movie popcorn message generated disgust, while the Halloween candy tampering message generated fear. Nonprofit organizations seeking donations generate emotions by showing you people—here’s a starving child named Rokia—rather than presenting abstractions such as statistics. The trick is determining what emotion you want to generate.
6) Stories: Telling stories is the best way to make a message memorable and get people to act on it. Stories motivate people to act through inspiration. But more importantly, they tell people how to act—stories are simulations in which listeners think through what they’d do in the same situation. They’re mental flight simulators. For instance, firefighters and medical personnel can learn how to respond to crises from the stories of colleagues.
Anyone can apply these six principles to craft a sticky message—they’re mostly common sense—yet a majority of people produce opaque, mind-numbing prose instead. The reason people don’t take simple steps to make their message compelling is that they’re blinded by a cognitive bias known as “the curse of knowledge.” Instead of keeping their message simple and concrete, they lapse into abstractions because they wrongly assume their listeners have the same level of knowledge or expertise as they do.
In 1990, Stanford Ph.D. student Elizabeth Newton illustrated the curse of knowledge with a study in which she asked subjects to choose a simple tune, such as “Jingle Bells,” from a list and tap out the rhythm on a table. She assigned other people to try to figure out the tune being tapped.
Tappers were shocked to learn that listeners guessed the song correctly only 2.5 percent of the time. Because they were hearing the song in their heads as they tapped (knowledge the listener didn’t possess), they thought their tapping was making the song perfectly clear. Because they had the curse-of-knowledge bias, they couldn’t imagine the perspective of the listener who wasn’t “hearing” the same song. Once you know something, it’s hard to remember that others don’t. Teachers obviously have to overcome this mismatch in knowledge between speaker and listener, but everyone with a message faces it to some degree. For instance, a CEO must translate her company’s strategy of maximizing shareholder value into clear terms for employees. The way to do it is to transform your message by using the six principles as a checklist.
For example, President John F. Kennedy sidestepped the curse of knowledge in 1961 when he presented an unexpected goal in simple, concrete, credible terms: He wanted to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. He could have said, “our mission is to become the international leader ... through maximum innovation…”. But he made his idea sticky and its impact was historic.
You don’t need to be a creative genius to create a sticky message. In 1999, researchers analyzed 200 award-winning advertisements and found that 89 percent of them fell into one of six categories or templates, most of which involved the principle of unexpectedness.
For example, one category was “extreme consequences.” This category included an ad for a powerful car stereo with the exaggerated ability to collapse a bridge with its vibrations. Another example is the World War II slogan and ad campaign, “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” (Shortform note: The point was to urge people to be careful not to say anything that a spy might be able to use.)
When researchers tried applying the six ad templates to 200 less-successful ads, they found that only 2 percent fit a template, which suggests that creative people use what works (templates), while less creative people reinvent the wheel.
The lesson is that if you want your message to stick, emulate how successful people have done it using the six SUCCESs principles.
In the simplest terms, there are only two steps to making your message stick: 1) find the essence and 2) translate the essence into a compelling message using the SUCCESs template. This chapter explains the first step, while the rest of the book covers step 2.
The first sentence above is an example of what you need to do with your message. It distills the essence or core of this book to a single sentence, albeit not a scintillating one.
The “S” in the SUCCESs formula for creating “sticky” messages stands for “simple.” Making your message simple doesn’t mean dumbing it down or making it simplistic like a typical sound bite. Simplifying it just means determining the most important thing about it, the essence or core that holds it together like gravity.
It must focus on one thing, not multiple things. The challenging part is prioritizing your points and then eliminating all but one central point. A simple, well-designed idea effectively shapes and guides others’ behavior. The following are some examples of how core-focused messages are created and how they work.
Military operations require massive amounts of planning, starting with an order from the president that flows down through numerous levels, becoming increasingly specific and detailed so that ultimately it dictates the actions of foot soldiers and everyone in between. The process is time-consuming but necessary—commanders must think through all the potential issues and options. However, the plans often prove to be worthless. The saying is that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Things always change due to a huge number of variables.
To make its planning more useful, the Army adopted the concept in the 1980s of “Commander’s Intent.” It refers to a concise statement at the top of each order, defining the goal or intended outcome. All aspects and details are distilled to a central point. At a high level, the Commander’s Intent could be abstract (“Break the enemy’s will…”) while at ground level it’s concrete (“Clear Hill 45 to protect the flank of the First Brigade”). Plans may change but everyone is responsible for executing the intent.
The Commander’s Intent coordinates people’s actions, while allowing them to react to changing circumstances as they pursue a clear goal. Finding the essence of your message is like writing a Commander’s Intent: focus on the most important thing.
Southwest Airlines is known for its obsession with finding ways to reduce costs. This goal has kept it profitable for decades and kept it ahead of its competition. But putting the cost-reduction goal into action requires communicating to thousands of employees what it means to them.
To do this, the airline has its own version of a Commander’s Intent, a simple message distilling cost reduction to its essence, which guides everyone’s actions: “Southwest is the low-fare airline.” CEO Herb Kelleher once gave an example of how it works. A marketing director proposed giving passengers on the Houston to Las Vegas flight a chicken Caesar salad instead of just peanuts. Kelleher’s question was: “Will adding the salad make Southwest the low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas?” The answer was no, so the salad idea was scrapped. The message works because any employee can apply the low-fare test to his or her actions: it’s about prioritization.
Journalism provides a model for how to find and convey what’s most important in a memorable way. A reporter’s first sentence, or lead, contains the most important elements of the story. For example, here’s a 1995 Washington Post lead from a compilation by the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
“JERUSALEM, Nov. 4—A right-wing Jewish extremist shot and killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin tonight as he departed a peace rally attended by more than 100,000 in Tel Aviv, throwing Israel’s government and the Middle East peace process into turmoil.”
News stories follow a structure called the inverted pyramid that presents the facts in decreasing order of importance, with the most important at the top. It’s convenient for time-starved readers—they don’t have to read far to get the most important points. Also, stories can be shortened easily from the bottom. Supposedly, the inverted pyramid structure originated in the Civil War when stories were transmitted by telegraph—the connection could be lost at any moment, so reporters had to convey the most important information first.
Although reporters are trained to prioritize and distill information, they can still get lost in the details and have trouble finding the key point or essence of a story. Missing the key point is referred to as “burying the lead.”
When crafting your message, think about what you’d want to say first, if you had to worry about losing your line of communication any second.
‘It’s the Economy, Stupid’
Most politicians like to talk, but as a presidential candidate in 1992, Bill Clinton was particularly susceptible to losing focus. He loved delving into policy details, answering media questions at length, and generally holding forth on any topic. Struggling to keep Clinton and his campaign focused, his political adviser James Carville one day wrote several phrases on a whiteboard. One of them was, “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” which became a central idea of the Clinton campaign.
Carville said he added with word “stupid” as a barb to remind campaign staff to not get too full of themselves. Clinton was frustrated by the constraint because he wanted to delve into the balanced budget issue being pushed by third-party candidate Ross Perot. But Clinton’s advisers insisted he stick to one “lead:” the economy. Multiple messages would be tantamount to having no message or burying the lead.
Once you’ve zeroed in on your key point, you need to communicate it. Knowing your priorities is one thing, but communicating and achieving them takes additional steps.
For example, Dunn, North Carolina newspaper publisher Hoover Adams encapsulated his top priority, providing relentlessly local coverage of his small community, in the phrase “Names, names, names.” The phrase was intended to remind reporters that covering the local community required getting local names into every story without exception.
But in addition to creating his message, he still needed to make it stick with his staff. He wrote a memo to convince them he wasn’t just paying lip service to the concept of “local first.” The memo was convincing because:
By identifying his top priority and communicating it in memorable terms, Adams ensured that “Names, names, names” was top of mind and guided each employee’s decisions like the force of gravity, whether the boss was present or not.
Adams’ clearly communicated, core-focused message has resulted in a paper read by 112% of the community, meaning that more newspapers are sold than there are households in Dunn.
“Names, names, names” worked because it was core and because Adams communicated it memorably. But it also worked for two more reasons: it was compact, meaning succinct, as well as profound. A simple message is core (distilled to its essence), compact, and says something of value.
Proverbs are an example of sticky messages that meet these criteria. Proverbs are compact distillations of wisdom that have lasted through centuries and cultures, guiding people’s behavior and ethics. The writer Miguel de Cervantes defined a proverb as “a short sentence based on long experience.”
Their stickiness is unparalleled. For instance, the proverb, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” exists in more than 55 languages. Versions of the “bird in hand” proverb have survived more than 2,500 years—without the help of an advertising campaign or social media.
Adams turned his core value, “Names, names, names,” into a journalistic proverb with impact and staying power. Compactness helps people learn and apply a core message.
Making your message compact, particularly when you’re conveying a complex idea, is challenging. Here are three techniques: Tap into schemas, create a high-concept pitch, or use a generative analogy.
A schema is basically a conceptual framework—information you’ve collected and mentally categorized based on generic properties—that you use to understand something complex. For instance, when someone mentions a sports car, your mind conjures up a picture of a typical sports car—small, red, two-door, convertible, fast—based on your past experience with sports cars.
To see how schemas work, imagine two ways you could describe an unfamiliar fruit to someone. One way would be to use a lot of detail: The pomelo, the largest citrus fruit, has a thick, soft rind that’s easy to peel. The fruit is light yellow to pink, varies from juicy to a bit dry, and tastes sweet, but tangy. This is a lot of information, but even so, it doesn’t convey the essence of the fruit.
However, using a schema (generic knowledge someone already has), you can instantly and understandably convey what a pomelo is: it’s an oversized grapefruit with a thick, soft skin.
“Grapefruit” is a schema—your grapefruit schema is a mental collection of generic properties including tangy flavor, yellow or pink color, a bit larger than a softball. This schema gives you a good idea of what the pomelo looks and tastes like. This second description is easier to understand and remember, even though it appears to contain less information than the first description.
Schemas allow you to pack a lot of meaningful information into a simple statement.
Teachers frequently use schemas to teach new or difficult concepts. For instance, some use the solar system model as a schema for how an atom works, with electrons orbiting the nucleus the way planets orbit the sun. This is an oversimplification (electrons actually travel in “probability clouds”), but the solar model provides a useful starting point—you have to keep your schemas simple in order for them to be useful and to avoid being sidetracked by the curse of knowledge.
Analogies are a simple way to call up a schema. For instance, you could use a simple analogy to describe a pomelo: A pomelo is like a grapefruit. Another example of an analogy is, “Life is like a box of chocolates” (Forrest Gump).
Hollywood producers use analogies to make “high-concept” (striking and easily communicated) pitches for new movie ideas. In just a sentence, the best ones can get the go-ahead for a $100 million movie. Besides attracting financial support, they also instantly tell everyone working on the movie what they’re aiming for.
Examples of high-concept pitches include “Die Hard on a bus” (for the movie Speed) and “Big for girls” (13 Going on 30). Hollywood’s high-concept pitches are essentially industry proverbs.
Generative analogies provide a model or platform the listener can use to generate additional insights. For instance, psychologists have long used the brain-as-a-computer metaphor (a type of analogy) to inspire insights and investigations. Computer features such as memory and processors suggest (or “generate”) ways to think about the brain. Good analogies are thus “generative.”
Using a generative analogy to create a sticky idea, Disney refers to its employees as cast members. For instance, they audition rather than interview for a job; their jobs are referred to as performances, and whenever employees are in the park, they’re on stage. The cast member analogy generates insight into how they should behave—for instance, not smoking while in costume (uniform).
Proverbs are the ultimate in simplicity, compactness, and meaning. A core message with these characteristics isn’t easy to create, but the experiences of the U.S. Army, Southwest Airlines, and Disney show that the benefits are worth the effort.
For a message to “stick” with a listener it must be simple. The key to simplifying a message is determining the most important thing about it, the core that holds it together like gravity. It should also be compact, or succinct, and meaningful.
Think of a hobby, sport, or skill you’re expert in. If you were teaching it to someone, how would you encapsulate it in a simple sentence that would guide a newbie practicing your craft? Remember to avoid the “curse of knowledge”—think like a beginner rather than an expert.
Now, try incorporating a schema or analogy into your message.
Describe your job in a simple sentence for someone unfamiliar with the details of your field. What is the core or essence?
The “U” in the SUCCESs formula for creating “sticky” messages stands for “unexpected.”
The first challenge of communication is getting people’s attention. Some people—for instance, parents or the president—get attention simply because they have authority. However, most people have to attract attention in some other way.
The best way to do it is to break a pattern: introduce the unexpected. Sameness makes people tune out. They become aware of things only when something changes—for instance, you snap to attention when your car or refrigerator starts making a strange noise. Your brain is engineered to be acutely aware of changes.
Here’s an example of how breaking a pattern got people’s attention. On every flight, flight attendants are required to give safety instructions, but they’ve become so routine that no one listens to them. However, one flight attendant got people’s attention by saying things they didn’t expect. For instance, during the seemingly obvious instructions for how to fasten and unfasten a seatbelt, she said: “For those who haven’t been in a car since 1965, the proper way to fasten a seatbelt is to slide the flat end into the buckle.” Regarding the exits, she said: “As the song goes, there might be fifty ways to leave your lover, but there are only six ways to leave this aircraft.” Passengers applauded her routine when she finished.
Her spiel did two things a message must do in order to stick: 1) get people’s attention: create surprise and 2) hold their attention: generate interest. She created surprise with her first unconventional remark, then maintained interest as she made additional jokes, which made people wonder what might come next.
Some ideas are naturally sticky because they present surprising facts. For instance, the Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure you can see from space. Or, you only use 10 percent of your brain capacity. (Both of these statements are false.)
When you surprise people, you nullify their ability to guess what’s coming next, or as the authors call it, “break their guessing machines.” When we realize we’ve guessed wrong (our schemas have failed), we snap to attention, which is a built-in biological response to prevent us from getting something wrong in the future. Our eyebrows go up, our eyes widen, and muscles tense as we stop everything in order to process where we went wrong.
An advertisement by the Ad Council triggered this response. The ad for a new minivan shows a father picking up his son after soccer practice and driving along attractive, tree-lined streets while the narrator describes the van’s features. The dad stops at an intersection, the camera cuts to the boy, who’s looking out the window, then the father pulls forward. Suddenly, the van is broadsided by another vehicle. The screen goes black and these words appear: “Didn’t see that coming? No one ever does. Buckle up—always.”
The ad surprises by defying people’s schema for minivan commercials (minivans deliver kids safely). Viewers are more likely to think about checking seatbelts before the next trip. Surprise makes us stop and think.
Surprise usually is short-lived. However, there are a few instances where surprising ideas generate ongoing attention—for example, conspiracy theories and gossip—where we want to know more or figure out what’s going on. Because of the surprise factor, conspiracy theories tend to crop up when a celebrity dies young, like JFK or Kurt Cobain, and people are trying to get their minds around it. In contrast, old people’s deaths typically don’t generate conspiracy theories.
A pitfall to avoid when using surprise to draw attention to your message is the gimmicky surprise. Attention-getting gimmicks are typically not relevant to the core message and leave your listeners feeling puzzled or cheated.
For instance, a Super Bowl 2000 ad for a dot-com fell flat when it grabbed attention through surprise, but viewers couldn’t figure out the message. It showed a college marching band performing at a football game, when suddenly a pack of wolves ran out of the tunnel and attacked the musicians. (Shortform note: here’s a video of the ad.)
To be effective in making your message stick, surprises must make sense in retrospect—when the listener thinks back, he or she must instantly see the logic connecting the surprise with a core message. To put it another way, if you disrupt your listener’s guessing ability, you have to fix it by showing how the surprise makes sense.
In summary, to use surprise to get attention:
Here are two examples of using surprise to upend old schemas while also replacing them with new, unforgettable schemas.
1) Nordstrom department store: Nordstrom’s mantra is extraordinary customer service. The company conveys to new employees just what that means through stories that replace old schemas with striking examples of how “Nordies” do it differently by, for example, ironing a just-purchased shirt so the buyer could wear it to an immediate presentation; refunding a customer for returned tire chains even though Nordstrom doesn’t sell tire chains; gift-wrapping items a customer bought at Macy’s.
These surprising stories replace employees’ past ideas of common-sense, efficiency-driven customer service with Nordstrom’s version of uncommon sense: going the extra mile no matter how absurd it may seem. The surprise element in the stories underscores the company’s core message.
2) Journalism lesson: Writer Nora Ephron recounted a lesson from a journalism teacher that “reset” her idea of the purpose of journalism. The teacher assigned students to write a lead based on a set of facts. The entire faculty of Beverly Hill High School would be attending a conference Thursday on new teaching methods. Speakers would include anthropologist Margaret Mead and California Governor Pat Brown. The students wrote leads focusing on the facts presented—for instance, “Governor Pat Brown and Margaret Mead will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty at a conference Thursday…”. However, after glancing through the students’ work, the teacher set it aside and revealed the correct lead: “There will be no school Thursday.”
Ephron replaced her old idea of journalism (simply presenting the facts) with a new one: reporting the meaning of the facts. In a single, surprising lesson, Ephron’s teacher transformed his students’ schema of journalism.
While surprise gets people’s attention and can even hold it for a short time, sometimes you need to keep people’s attention longer in order to convey a complex message. You do this by creating interest in two ways: 1) create a mystery or 2) generate curiosity.
Mysteries sustain interest because people want closure. When intrigued by a puzzle or question, they’ll follow a story to get to a conclusion without knowing exactly how they’ll get there. It can be a painless and memorable way of absorbing a complicated message.
For example, an Arizona State University professor was searching for ways to engage his students and found a scientific article that used mystery to pull in readers and hold their interest. It began by asking, “What are Saturn’s rings made of?” The writer then told a story of numerous theories and investigations that led nowhere, before he presented the surprising answer: dust.
The professor began using the mystery technique to present concepts in his classes. He introduced a mystery at the beginning of a lecture, but held off on revealing the answer until the end. In one instance, he ran out of time before the bell rang, but his students didn’t want to leave until he provided the answer.
Mysteries sustain attention by going beyond the first moment of surprise and leading listeners on a journey.
You can also hold people’s interest by making them curious. According to the “gap theory” of interest, our curiosity is aroused when we encounter a gap in our knowledge. Wanting to know something causes a sort of pain and to relieve it, we need to fill the gap in our knowledge. For example, we’ll sit through a bad movie because not knowing the end would be painful.
Movies make us want to know what’s going to happen. Similarly, mystery novels raise the question of who did it. We watch sports to find out who will win.
To craft a message that holds attention, before telling people the facts, you need to create or exploit a knowledge gap by suggesting there’s something important that they don’t know. Ways to do this include:
Local news programs highlight a knowledge gap by teasing upcoming news stories: “Find out which local restaurant was cited for not cleaning the silverware.” (Shortform note: Other examples today are Facebook’s “clickbait” headlines like “Shutdown of nuke plant has a surprising stinging consequence” and the chyrons on cable news like “The most dangerous celebrity online is revealed”.)
A listener’s overconfidence can be an obstacle to your efforts to create a knowledge gap. Research shows that people tend to overestimate how much they know. There are several ways to counter this:
1) Make people commit to a flawed schema, then shoot it down, as Nora Ephron’s journalism professor did.
2) Make listeners publicly commit to a prediction, for instance by asking for a show of hands. Sometimes this deters overconfidence because people don’t want to be proven wrong publicly.
Some topics or formats naturally create knowledge gaps. For instance, human interest stories make us want to know how someone feels, while gossip fills in what we want to know about celebrities’ lives.
If people don’t know much about a topic to begin with, you have to provide enough information to spark their curiosity or desire to know. In the 1960s, when ABC got a license to broadcast NCAA football games, a young executive named Roone Arledge came up with a way to interest viewers in games that didn’t involve their favorite teams. His strategy was to place the viewer at the game by focusing not just on the action on the field, but also on the fans, hoopla, campus, and the surrounding area. In addition, he suggested having sports announcers explain the emotions and past history affecting a game. The plan worked—the network made viewers care by providing context, then created further interest with knowledge gaps.
When you’re a visionary, highlighting a huge knowledge gap or “mission impossible” can inspire scientists, inventors, and the public imagination. Here are two examples.
A pocket radio: Soon after the invention of the transistor, Sony technologist Masaru Ibuka wanted to explore applications for the new technology, but needed to come up with a way to hook the interest of his scientists and engineers. So, in the era when radios were so big they were incorporated into furniture, he came up with the idea of a pocket radio. It was an attention-getting idea. The idea that a young company like Sony could pull it off was equally outlandish. But Ibuka’s engineers seized the challenge and the development and production of a pocket radio inspired years of effort and transformed Sony into a major company.
Man on the Moon: In 1961, while the Soviet Union led the world in space exploration, President John F. Kennedy made his bold proposal to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth within 10 years. His unexpected idea mobilized the work of hundreds of people for years and caught the imagination of the nation.
Both the pocket radio and the moon mission were unexpected ideas that identified big knowledge gaps, and both ideas had huge staying power.
The best way to get people’s attention is to break a pattern or introduce the unexpected. Sameness makes people tune out. After getting their attention you have to hold it by generating curiosity.
Can you think of a time when you were surprised by a speaker or message—for instance, at a class lecture, Sunday sermon, or a company meeting? What caught your attention and why?
Think of an instance where you were trying to get a message across but people weren’t listening to you. Why do you think they weren’t paying attention?
How could you have introduced something unexpected into your message to get attention and then generate ongoing interest?
The “C” in the SUCCESs formula for creating “sticky” messages stands for “concrete.” Many ideas fail to resonate because they’re presented in abstract terms, language unconnected to a specific person, object, or situation. Abstraction makes ideas harder to grasp and remember; abstract instructions are harder to implement because they can be interpreted in different ways. The curse of knowledge comes into play when experts forget what being a novice was like and instead speak in abstractions.
The opposite of abstract is concrete, the third essential characteristic of a sticky message.
Fables are one of the best examples of concreteness. Consider Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes: A fox came upon some grapes high on a vine, but after jumping at them repeatedly, he couldn’t get them. So he walked away muttering that they were probably sour anyway. An abstract admonition to be graceful in defeat wouldn’t have had the impact or longevity of the fable, which concretely demonstrates what we still refer to as a “sour grapes” attitude.
What makes something concrete is specificity. The words “high performance” are abstract while “V-8 engine” is concrete. A company’s strategy is abstract, but its software is concrete. Nordstrom’s goal of extreme customer service is abstract; a Nordie gift-wrapping something bought at Macy’s is concrete.
So how do you make your message as concrete as a fable, so people understand and remember it? Here are some ways.
Researchers studying Japanese teaching methods found that the teachers explained abstract math concepts by connecting them with concrete, familiar things. They used this approach about twice as often as teachers in the U.S. did.
For instance, to explain subtraction, a teacher placed fifty tiles on a desk in five rows of ten each. She removed three rows and asked the students how many were left. The demonstration gave them a visual image of subtraction.
The teachers taught abstract math principles by first creating a concrete foundation or context, which can be useful for communicating other kinds of messages as well. For instance, if you write a recipe instructing the cook to stir soup to a hearty consistency, it won’t be useful unless you provide context on what “hearty” means.
Accounting principles, such as balance sheets and accounts receivable, became concrete when Georgia State University professors turned an introductory course into a semester-long simulation. Students participated in the “launch” of a business selling a new product called Safe Night Out or SNO, a tracking device parents could place in a teenager’s car.
The students first had to determine the idea’s feasibility, then set up a system for tracking production, sales, and delivery costs. They discovered the difference between fixed and variable costs, which are key accounting concepts that can be hard to grasp from a traditional lecture. They dealt with challenges such as cash flow and bounced checks, and an unexpected request to lease the devices rather than buying them.
The concrete approach to introductory accounting paid off: The top-performing students who took the course were more likely to major in accounting and even the average students did much better in the next accounting course.
People sometimes think of memory as being like a filing cabinet, where memories are filed or stored until you need to retrieve them. But it’s misleading because different types of memories are accessed in different ways. For instance, your brain remembers the words of a song differently than how it remembers what your childhood home was like. When you recall song lyrics, you “hear” the music and the artist. When you recall your house, you might mentally walk through the rooms, remembering sights, sounds, and smells.
When your goal is helping listeners remember your message, it’s more useful to think of memory as working like Velcro, the hook-and-loop fastening system. Messages with more hooks stick better to the brain’s loops or memory.
Blue Eyes Versus Brown Eyes
In 1968, Iowa elementary-school teacher Jane Elliott created a message with so many hooks that it stuck with her students for decades and even changed their lives. She had discussed discrimination with her third graders in the past. But when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Elliott felt she needed to communicate the significance of his life and death in a way that would be concrete and memorable to children living in an all-white town.
She divided her class into two groups: kids with blue eyes and kids with brown eyes. She announced that brown-eyed kids were superior to those with blue eyes and she began treating them that way—they got extra time at recess and other privileges. They sat in the front of the room while blue-eyed kids sat in the back; the groups weren’t allowed to mix. The blue-eyed children had to wear special collars so they could be identified from a distance.
The class atmosphere changed immediately as brown-eyed kids began taunting blue-eyed kids. The next day, Elliott announced she’d been wrong: The blue-eyed kids actually were superior to the brown-eyed kids. The same superior-inferior dynamic developed again when roles were reversed. It began to affect academic performance—the supposedly inferior children took longer to complete assignments. One student in the “inferior” group said later that they did poorly because they couldn’t stop thinking about the collars they were wearing.
The exercise had a lasting impact: research studies done ten and twenty years later showed that the students who participated were significantly less prejudiced than those who hadn’t. At a 15-year reunion videoed by PBS, the students were still talking about how profound the experience had been and how it continued to guide their thinking and behavior.
Elliott had put numerous memory “hooks” into her lesson: the feeling of friends turning on you, being marked as inferior by wearing a collar, and feelings of elation, despair, and self-doubt. The students never forgot it.
Experts and novices in the same situation think differently about it. Experts often think abstractly, which creates a barrier to communication. They see details as representing a system, concept, or idea, which they’re inclined to talk about at a high level, while novices focus on the details.
For example:
Here’s an example of how experts’ tendency toward abstraction made it difficult to solve a problem at a manufacturing company.
When a machine broke down, the manufacturing workers described what happened to the engineers. But instead of identifying the immediate cause and telling—or, better yet, showing—the line workers how to fix it, the engineers started reworking their blueprints. They viewed the problem in the abstract and when they presented their revised drawings to the line workers, nobody understood them. To communicate, the experts needed to speak the concrete language of the machine operators, focused on what the machines did when the operators took various actions.
People can’t work together when they speak different languages. To bridge the communication gap between your expertise and your audience’s, you need to speak at your listeners’ level of understanding and make it concrete.
Companies set goals in an effort to coordinate the actions of many people. However, when leaders are abstract rather than concrete about what they want to accomplish, they create uncertainty, which impedes progress.
For instance, a company might announce an abstract goal of building the next great search engine. One programmer might focus on speed in returning search results, while another might focus on completeness. Progress can’t be made until everyone is moving in the same direction and understands, in concrete terms, what it means for a search engine to be “great.”
In the 1960s, Boeing succeeded in aligning the efforts of hundreds of people designing and building a new aircraft, the 727 passenger plane, with a concrete goal: it has to seat 131 people, fly from Miami to New York nonstop, and land on LaGuardia runway 4-22 (which was unusually short). This concrete goal dictated thousands of design and manufacturing steps. In contrast, it would have been much more difficult to implement an abstract goal of building the world’s best passenger aircraft.
A simulation that lets people experience your idea is another way of making your idea concrete. For example, in 2002, Hewlett-Packard wanted to persuade Disney to use HP technology in its theme parks. HP could have created a typical PowerPoint presentation, but opted for radical concreteness instead.
They hired an innovative consulting firm, Stone Yamashita Partners, which created a 6,000-square-foot exhibit starting with a simulation of a family’s living room and progressing through the phases of a trip to Disney World. It was a sensory experience for viewers. For instance, the exhibit showed HP technology helping a family buy tickets, schedule dinner reservations, and reduce waiting times for rides. When the fictional family returned to their hotel room at the end of a long day, the exhibit showed them finding a digital picture frame displaying their ride on a roller-coaster.
The exhibit, which was set up on the HP campus, helped engineers focus on creating technology to meet the real-life needs of a family, and it made the value of that technology concrete for Disney executives.
Presenting an idea in a concrete way can also create a platform or jumping-off point for others to build on the concept.
For example, in 1987, Jerry Kaplan, a young entrepreneur, used a simple, concrete visual to sell an idea to venture capitalists by triggering their imaginations. Kaplan started by describing his idea for a notebook-sized computer using a pen rather than a keyboard for taking notes, sending and receiving messages via cellular technology, looking up contacts and phone numbers, using spreadsheets, and so on.
When he finished, the audience was silent, so he did one more thing. He tossed his leather folder onto the table, as a visual representation of the next ground-breaking computer. Once they were able to visualize the size and compactness of the proposed computer, the investors began asking questions and sharing ideas. A few days later, they agreed to back the idea of the tune of $4.5 million.
To help you think concretely when framing your message, focus on people, not data. Here are two examples.
Of the six principles for crafting a message that sticks, concreteness may be the easiest to apply. However, it’s often neglected because of our tendency to return to the comfort of abstraction, like engineers tinkering with their drawings.
Concreteness helps people understand and remember a message. However, businesses and organizations often present their goals in abstract language. People don’t know what applying the goals looks like in practice.
Think of a company or organization you’re part of. What is its goal? Is it abstract or concrete?
What does the goal mean to you in your role or job? How do others in the organization interpret it? How does it affect decision-making?
How could you rewrite the goal in concrete terms so that everyone understands it and interprets it in the same way?
The second “C” in the SUCCESs formula for creating “sticky” messages stands for “credible.” Besides being easy to grasp, your message has to be believable. People’s beliefs are shaped by social influences, such as family, friends, and faith, as well as personal experience. Countering people’s beliefs or getting them to believe a new message seems like a daunting task at first glance. Yet urban legends and false stories stick and spread easily.
The reason is that in addition to being easy to understand, they use authority to establish credibility. The simplest way to make your message credible is to be an authoritative source or to quote one. Well-known experts such as the Surgeon General (for health messages), Alan Greenspan (economics), or Bill Nye (science) lend weight to messages in those fields. Another type of authority is the celebrity who endorses products—celebrities have credibility with people who aspire to be like them.
Here are two messages with seemingly authoritative sources but different outcomes:
The examples show that the amount and type of authority you need to make a message credible depends on the audience. Average people believed a bogus source in the banana scare example, but doctors doubted medical colleagues whose ulcer research challenged current thinking.
Fortunately, however, the ulcer research story didn’t end there. One of the researchers, Barry Marshall, got frustrated with the disbelief and added a layer of authority to the message that was harder to dismiss.
One morning, with colleagues as witnesses, he chugged a glass of water containing about a billion ulcer-causing bacteria. When he got extremely sick a few days later, tests showed his stomach lining was inflamed, which is the early stage for developing an ulcer. Then, he cured himself with an antibiotic. His demonstration prompted other researchers to build evidence supporting his ulcer finding, although it took ten more years for the National Institutes of Health to back antibiotics as a treatment for ulcers. Finally, ten years after that, Marshall and his colleague, Robin Warren, received a Nobel Prize.
Marshall’s message finally became credible when other researchers, prompted by his vivid demonstration, added authority by confirming his findings.
Using experts and celebrities as authorities builds external credibility for a message. Alternatively, you can buttress your message by using someone who’s an authority by virtue of personal experience.
In the 1990s, Pam Laffin, a 29-year-old mother who suffered devastating effects from smoking, was a compelling messenger for a series of anti-smoking ads. She had started smoking at age 10 and had emphysema by 24. A lung transplant attempt failed. A series of public service ads showed spots on her lungs and surgical scars on her back and showed her struggling to breathe. She died two years later. Her message was powerful and authoritative because of her direct experience.
For some messages, the trustworthiness of a source rather than their status or expertise can make them an authority worth listening to. For instance, you may not believe a commercial that extols the benefits of a shampoo, but if a friend starts raving about it, you’re likely to give it a try.
If you don’t have access to an authority who can give your message external credibility, you can build internal credibility in four ways.
Concrete, vivid details make a message believable. For instance, if you’re a Civil War enthusiast and you tell an interesting Civil War story, your knowledge of the details will give you credibility and at the same time, the details will make the story itself credible. Similarly, urban legends, particularly horror stories, seem credible when localized details, such as street names and familiar landmarks, are used.
One research study showed that details can lend credibility even if they’re irrelevant to the message. In a simulated exercise in which “jurors” were tasked with deciding whether a mother should retain custody of her son, the jurors were more likely to believe she was a good mother when given additional, vivid details like the fact that her son had a Darth Vader toothbrush. Even though the detail was irrelevant in a legal sense, it served a purpose: it allowed the jurors to picture the child using the toothbrush, which gave credibility to the argument that the woman was a good mother because she made sure her son brushed his teeth.
Using statistics can help build internal credibility for a message, as long as they’re presented in an accessible way. For example, in the 1980s, an anti-nuclear weapons group struggled to make audiences understand the scale of the world’s nuclear arsenal of 5,000 warheads. The number by itself didn’t mean anything, so they created a simple demonstration comparing the capability of one Hiroshima bomb to the capability of the current arsenal. To represent the Hiroshima bomb, a speaker for the group would drop a single BB into a metal bucket. Then he dropped ten BBs into the bucket to represent the capacity of one nuclear-armed submarine—this made a lot more noise than one BB did. Finally, to represent the world’s nuclear capacity, he dumped 5,000 BBs into the bucket. The reverberating roar made the number tangible and credible.
The BB example makes another key point: the way to make statistics meaningful is to show a relationship. The statistic of 37 grams of fat in a bag of movie popcorn became meaningful when it was related to the amount in a full day of high-fat meals.
Another way to make statistics accessible is to put them in the context of human experience—for instance, introducing a scientific concept this way: “Imagine throwing a rock from Los Angeles to New York…”
Frank Sinatra famously sang about New York, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” The message is that one big success (the ultimate) means you can’t miss—it gives you credibility. Similarly, one standout example can be your ultimate credential. For instance, if your company provided security for Fort Knox, that fact alone would say more about the value of your security services than any numbers you could quote.
Giving your audience a way to test the truth of your message themselves can give it unimpeachable credibility—your audience becomes your authority.
For instance, Wendy’s famous “Where’s the beef?” ad of the 1980s implicitly challenged customers to prove for themselves that Wendy’s burgers had substantially more beef than competitors’ burgers offered. The humorous ad showed a group of elderly fast-food customers staring at a small beef patty dwarfed by a huge bun. One customer asked repeatedly, “Where’s the beef?”—which suggested that other fast-food customers might want to see for themselves how Wendy’s burgers outdistanced the competition.
One persistent urban legend connecting Snapple fruit drinks to the KKK has succeeded in part because it has a self-testing mechanism. As verifiable evidence, the story pointed to two graphics on the Snapple label, a “slave ship” and a logo with the initial K. In fact, the ship on the label derived from an engraving of the Boston Tea Party, and the K logo was a kosher symbol. But for gullible people, just seeing the symbols on the label for themselves was verification enough.
Testable credentials can be applied to ideas beyond the advertising realm. For instance, The NBA used this method during rookie orientation to make its message about the threat of AIDS credible. All rookies were required to attend a week-long orientation at a hotel in New York. The first evening before training, many of them flirted at the hotel bar with a group of female fans. At a group orientation session the next morning, the rookies were surprised when the same women introduced themselves this way, “I’m Brandy and I’m HIV positive.” Rather than hearing a lecture against risky sexual behavior, the rookies learned for themselves to be wary.
As the examples illustrate, there are many ways to build credibility for a message. You can use multiple methods or, if one doesn’t work, add another, as ulcer researcher Barry Marshall did.
Using an external authority to bolster your message is one way to make it believable or credible. Another way is to build internal credibility by using details, statistics, and compelling examples.
Think of an entertaining or surprising story you heard from a friend or coworker recently that you were skeptical of. What were the key points? Did you believe the story?
What specific elements of the story made you believe it or question it? For instance, did it cite a credible source or include convincing details? What were they?
What would have made the story more credible to you?
The “E” in the SUCCESs formula for creating “sticky” messages stands for “emotional.” If you want your audience to act on your message—for instance, to donate to a charitable cause or adopt healthier habits—you need to make them care.
The way to get people to care is to make them feel something. Some messages are designed to appeal to your emotions for cynical or self-serving reasons—for instance, a political ad might try to scare you into not voting for a certain candidate. But more typically, you might want people to care about your message in order to help solve a problem like child obesity or to accomplish a goal, such as building a more fuel-efficient car.
There are multiple ways to appeal to your listeners’ emotions. The simplest and most familiar way is to give your message a face. You might call it the Mother Teresa principle. Known for devoting her life to caring for the poor, she once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” She was motivated when she connected emotionally with an individual.
Thus, many charities inspire donations and volunteerism by showing the faces of those they serve, whether they’re hungry children, homeless people, or disaster victims. Similarly, animal welfare organizations prompt donations by showing neglected animals.
A 1994 Carnegie-Mellon University study confirmed the psychology behind this. They tested two different appeals for donations to fight world hunger to see which was the most effective. One letter described the problem by using statistics (“More than 11 million people in Ethiopia are hungry”), while a second letter told people their donations would go to a seven-year-old girl in Mali, Africa. Those who received the second letter gave more money.
When another group of participants received both solicitation letters—the statistics and the personal story—they gave less than those who’d received the child-focused letter alone. The researchers theorized that seeing the statistics put recipients into a more analytical frame of mind and their emotions took a back seat.
Other considerations in crafting a message with emotional appeal include: identifying the right emotion, using powerful associations, and appealing to self-interest or identity.
Appealing to people’s compassion for children or animals isn’t complicated, but some messages and audiences are more challenging. In the following example, an organization called The American Legacy Foundation wanted to get teenagers to care enough to avoid smoking or to quit.
Success hinged on identifying the right emotion to tap. Anti-smoking ads sometimes try to make kids feel afraid by providing mortality statistics, which seldom works. But the foundation’s “Truth” campaign in 1988 appealed to a stronger teenage emotion: resentment.
The ad showed a tractor-trailer pulling up in front of a building on a dark New York City street; a headline at the bottom of the screen identified it as “the headquarters of a major tobacco company.” Teenagers jumped out and started unloading and stacking white sacks labeled as body bags. After they finished, a teenager with a megaphone asked, “Do you know how many people tobacco kills every day?” The toll, depicted by the number of body bags, was 1,800.
Surveys asking teenagers whether they were likely to smoke a cigarette in the coming year indicated that those who’d seen the ad were 66 percent less likely to smoke. Another study found that smoking among high school students dropped 18 percent and among middle school students 40 percent, during the two years of the campaign. The ad worked because it made teenagers feel resentful toward corporate exploitation. It touched the right emotion.
To make people care about a message, it’s not necessary to manufacture an emotion. You can make them care by using terms and concepts that already have an emotional association. You connect something people care about with something you want them to care about.
(Shortform note: Using positive associations is a common advertising technique. For example, an ad might associate the positive qualities of a superstar athlete, like popularity and winning, with a certain brand of athletic shoe. Or an ad could associate happy, healthy children with a juice brand.)
The challenge is that many associations lose their emotional power over time because of overuse of the concept that initially triggered the desired emotion. In 1988, an organization called the Positive Coaching Alliance ran into this problem. They wanted to combat bad behavior in youth sports but found that talking about sportsmanship no longer worked because the emotional resonance of the term had eroded. Some coaches even viewed the concept negatively because youth leagues had started giving sportsmanship awards as consolation prizes. The message was that sportsmanship was for losers.
The PCA needed to replace “sportsmanship” with a new term that associated good behavior with love and respect for the sport. They came up with the concept of “honoring the game” to suggest that participants and fans owed respect to their sport as an institution. The way to convey your respect was by behaving honorably.
The PCA found that after they conducted training that associated “honoring the game” with good behavior, the number of people ejected from games in one Northern California league plummeted. Team morale improved and enrollment increased.
Another way to make people care about something is to appeal to their self-interest: tell them how they personally will benefit from acting on your message. Again, advertising offers many examples.
Mail-order ads were once a common method of advertising. These ads appeared in newspapers and magazines and people who wanted the product filled out an order form and mailed it to the company with their money. Mail-order ads often appealed to people’s self-interest in feeling more capable, popular, or attractive.
The most effective ads were written by John Caples, who basically invented the genre and wrote a textbook on it. One of his classics was an ad for a correspondence course in music. It read: “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano … But When I Started to Play!” The technique was so successful and has so many applications that it’s still used today. (“My Husband Laughed When I Ordered …”)
Caples said that in every headline, he tried to suggest something the reader would want. He focused on benefits rather than the features of a product. For instance, if you sell grass seed, instead of stressing that your grass seed is the best, tell people they can have their neighborhood’s best lawn.
Self-Interest isn’t always crass; sometimes it can be noble. For instance, people may join the military or choose certain occupations for altruistic reasons. They may contribute to a cause because they truly want to improve others’ lives, not because they want to see their name on a plaque.
Abraham Maslow’s 1954 hierarchy of needs is useful as a reminder to appeal to people’s altruistic motivations more often. Maslow identified a list of needs that motivate people, arranged as a ladder or progression. He contended that people start at the bottom, fulfilling physical and security needs first, and end at the top with self-actualization and transcendence. But later research suggests people pursue multiple needs, including the higher-order needs, at the same time.
Floyd Lee, a retired U.S. Army and Marine Corps cook, who returned to Iraq to run a unique mess hall for U.S. troops, is an example of a person motivated by higher values. His mess hall outside the Baghdad airport became legendary among soldiers for its exquisitely prepared food and welcoming atmosphere—he had the same raw materials to work with as every other dining hall, but he elevated serving food to soldiers to a personal mission. He saw himself as not just in charge of food service, but also of morale, and that attitude guided everyone who worked in his dining hall.
The lesson is to not underestimate people’s altruistic side when appealing to self-interest.
There are times when people put group identity above self-interest, and it’s necessary to adjust the benefits you highlight accordingly.
For example, a company marketing a safety video to firefighters for their outreach programs ended up insulting the firefighters in one department by offering a free gift of a popcorn popper in exchange for previewing the video. The firefighters were insulted because accepting a gift for paying attention to safety was at odds with their identity as firefighters. Safety was a core value: they were accustomed to risking their lives for others’ safety. They didn’t need a gift to motivate or remind them of that. A better approach by the marketer would have been to offer to make a donation to a community safety program in exchange for previewing the video or to offer no gift at all.
Everyone has group affiliations that can take precedence at times over self-interest. They include race, religion, political party, gender, and occupation. In situations where group identity is important to them, they do what they think people in their group would do—for instance, they ask themselves how someone of their faith would vote on a particular issue.
An anti-litter campaign succeeded in Texas by appealing to group identity. The campaign was designed to appeal to the tough guys in pickups who did most of the littering. Instead of a slogan like “Please Don’t Litter,” the campaign appealed to their macho identity as Texans with the slogan, “Don’t Mess With Texas,” which meant that real Texans don’t litter. In a TV ad, two Dallas Cowboys football players picked up litter, expressed disgust, and menacingly promised to deliver the message, “Don’t Mess with Texas,” to whomever they caught littering. Within a year, littering had declined nearly 30 percent.
The “S” in the SUCCESs formula for creating “sticky” messages stands for “stories.” Using stories in your messages inspires action. Stories motivate people to act and they tell people how to act.
In the late 1990s, Subway introduced a line of seven healthier sandwiches, each with under 6 grams of fat. It touted them in an ad campaign with the message “7 under 6.” That wasn’t a very sticky message by the standards of this book, but it caught the attention of college student Jared Fogle, who, at 425 pounds, had developed disabling health and mobility problems. He resolved to lose weight and started by trying one of Subway’s low-fat subs. He liked it and developed a diet of a 12-inch veggie sub for lunch and a six-inch turkey sub for dinner.
Over three months, he lost nearly 100 pounds, so he continued. He also began walking. A former roommate was so impressed with Fogle’s transformation that he wrote an article for the college paper. A writer for a national health magazine saw the article and mentioned the Subway diet in an article on crazy diets.
The story took a circuitous route to national fame after that. A Subway franchise owner tried to get the chain’s national ad agency to pick up the story, but they weren’t interested. So he pushed the idea at the regional level, and an ad campaign was launched on Jan. 1, 2000, coinciding with the annual interest in New Year’s resolutions. USA Today and the networks soon called, followed by Oprah. Suddenly, Subway’s national marketing arm woke up and rolled out the ad nationally. The chain’s sales went up 18 percent that year.
A comparison to the SUCCESs checklist shows why the Subway diet story went big and stuck.
While Subway’s national marketing agency missed the Fogle story at first, you can learn to spot inspirational stories to help your messages stick. Just as the majority of effective advertisements draw on a handful of sticky templates, inspirational stories have templates as well.
The popular Chicken Soup for the Soul books are collections of inspirational stories that have been around since 1993. The authors analyzed hundreds of them to understand what makes an inspirational story successful and found that more than 80 percent feature one of three basic plots.
The most common plots for inspirational stories are:
In a challenge plot, the protagonist overcomes a major challenge. The story of David and Goliath is a challenge story—David brings down a giant with only a slingshot. Variations include the rags-to-riches story, underdog story, and the persistence story. Jared Fogle’s weight loss is a challenge story.
Starting with the American Revolution, U.S. history and culture are replete with challenge stories including the moon launch, Seabiscuit, and sports triumphs like the U.S. hockey team’s victory over the Russians in the 1980 Olympics. They’re lessons in perseverance and courage.
Connection stories are about people who bridge race, class, religious, ethnic, or other divides. They’re about building relationships. Romance stories such as Romeo and Juliet and the movie Titanic are connection stories, but the classic connection story is the Bible’s story of the Good Samaritan, about a man who was attacked by robbers and left lying along a road. Several people passed without helping before a Samaritan stopped, treated the victim’s wounds and took him to an inn so he could recover. The Samaritan bridged a divide by caring for a Jew despite hostility between the two cultures.
The connection plot is the most common format in the Chicken Soup series and is also the basis for many advertisements.
The creativity plot features someone solving a problem in a creative way or having an epiphany as Isaac Newton did when an apple fell on his head and sparked his theory of gravity. The MacGyver TV series of 1985 (resurrected in 2016) was built around a creativity plot: the title character had a talent for unconventional problem-solving, which he applied in each episode.
Another creativity story involved a team at Ingersoll-Rand, a manufacturer of industrial grinders used in auto shops. The team, which was tasked with developing a new grinder in less than a year, came up with a novel way to test whether plastic would make a sufficiently durable casing for a grinder (usually the casings were metal). The team tied pieces of plastic to the bumper of a vehicle and dragged them around, which demonstrated that a plastic composite would work.
If you find a story following one of the three templates that aligns with your goal, don’t hesitate to make it part of your message. If you know what you’re looking for and can spot it, you don’t need to invent your own story.
Former World Bank official Stephen Denning used what he called springboard stories to inspire colleagues and others to help develop solutions to problems. In his book, The Springboard, he describes a springboard story as one that creates buy-in on problems and opens up possibilities for change.
For instance, while at the World Bank he was assigned to study the organization’s information management, an abstract topic difficult to grasp or be enthusiastic about. So, whenever he talked to executives and colleagues about information flow, he told the story of an aid worker in Zambia who spent time desperately searching for information to help combat a local outbreak of malaria—information the World Bank could have easily made available. Whenever Denning told the story, colleagues offered ideas for better information sharing.
Denning contended that when you present information with statistics or assertions, you implicitly invite your audience to analyze and debate your ideas. But with a story, you open their minds and enlist their help.
Besides inspiring people to act, stories tell them how to act and even let them mentally practice responding to a situation. In this way, stories are simulations.
For instance, medical personnel and firefighters often tell each other stories about how they handled crisis situations. The stories are inspiring, but also share information about what works and doesn’t work in such situations.
For example, in his book Sources of Power, psychologist Gary Klein tells the story of a critical care nurse who noticed an infant’s breathing problem and summoned emergency help. As the staff started the standard emergency procedures, something didn’t seem right to her. She realized the heart monitor was wrong—emergency staff had misdiagnosed the problem and were starting to treat the baby’s lungs instead of his heart. She intervened by knocking a syringe from the neonatologist’s hand and starting heart compressions, which saved the baby’s life.
The story was an inspiring tale of courage and risk on the nurse’s part, but also warned against relying too much on machines and illustrated what to do in a situation like this.
People in other professions also share stories that inspire and educate coworkers. However, in some cases, the stories go a step further by allowing listeners to mentally practice solving a problem.
For instance, in one study, a pair of Xerox copier technicians told coworkers a story of how, step by step, they diagnosed a difficult problem and fixed it, despite being distracted by an incorrect error code message. As they told the story, their fellow technicians mentally walked with them through the problem, considering the options and steps to take. The story was a mental simulation in which they could practice their own response.
Studies show that mental rehearsals or simulations lead to more effective responses to real circumstances. For instance, researchers at UCLA asked two groups of students to think about a problem that was stressing them. The first group was told to visualize success, while the second group was asked to simulate the problem, or mentally walk through it from beginning to end. When the groups reported back on how they had coped with their problem, the simulation group members were more likely to have taken steps to solve the problem. They were also more likely to report that their mood had improved and they’d learned from the experience. The lesson is that simulation or practice is more effective than a positive mental attitude in solving problems.
Mental simulation is powerful. Other studies have shown that it can even trigger physical responses, meaning that mentally simulating an action can be much like actually doing it. For instance, when people are given water to drink and told to imagine it’s lemon juice, they salivate more, as if they were actually drinking lemon juice. Similarly, stories act like mental flight simulators, allowing listeners to practice actions they can take. Including these kinds of stories can make your message stickier.
An inspirational story can help you get your message across. The key is spotting stories you can use. There are three common types: challenge stories, connection stories, and creativity stories.
Think of a story you read or heard recently that was inspiring and stuck in your mind. What made it inspiring? Was it a challenge, connection, or creativity story?
How did the story make you feel and act?
Think of something that you and your coworkers need to accomplish at work. What kind of story might improve your performance? Where could you look for such a story?
Following are some challenges and tips for putting the SUCCESs checklist into practice to make your ideas stick.
1) If the message works, leave it alone, even if it’s not exactly the message you intended. Once you’ve presented your idea, your audience owns it and may adapt it in ways you didn’t expect. They may change the meaning, compress it, or improve on it. For instance, Dodgers coach Leo Durocher is credited with the phrase, “Nice guys finish last,” but he actually said something longer and more complicated. For years, he denied the shortened version, but it stuck and he eventually gave up and used it as the title of his autobiography.
2) To stay alert and able to spot useful ideas and stories, imagine wearing a set of core idea lenses, allowing you to look at things from the perspective of how they might support your core idea. This is similar to the way you start keeping an eye out for an appropriate gift when you know someone’s birthday is coming up.
3) Don’t worry about being a great speaker—worry instead about telling the right story. A Stanford study showed that even when you have strong speaking skills, people don’t remember what you say, especially data, unless you make it sticky by telling a good story. Also beware of the curse of knowledge—communicate at the level of your audience.
4) Use the SUCCESs checklist to address these problems:
5) Remember that with sticky ideas, you can make a difference. Think of Jane Elliott’s lesson on prejudice, Floyd Lee’s mess hall, Barry Marshall’s ulcer demonstration, Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher. Normal people in everyday situations, who know how to make ideas stick, have a profound impact.