Don’t you find it annoying that you often remember the most useless stories and messages while forgetting the crucial stuff, like how to do your taxes? Me too!
Even false stories and messages stick in our brains. For example, the Great Wall of China can be seen from space or that we only use 10% of our brain. And we’ll probably never forget “Make America Great Again.”
So, what makes some ideas so damn sticky? Chip and Dan Heath have written a whole book about it: “Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.”
After analyzing hundreds of sticky ideas, they noticed patterns in the ways these messages are formulated. That led to the notion that the art of getting attention and making an idea stick can be systematized.
Chip and Dan reveal six principles that you can use to make your messages more sticky, whether you’re marketing a product, presenting a new idea to your boss, or communicating with your team. But before I show you those, let’s first clarify ….
Why is it so hard to develop sticky messages?
The villain is a psychological tendency called the Curse of Knowledge.
Once we know something, it’s almost impossible for us to imagine what it was like before we knew it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. That makes it so much more difficult for us to share our knowledge with others.
Here’s how this happens. According to Chip and Dan, getting an idea across has two stages: the Answer stage and the Telling Others stage. In the Answer stage, you leverage your experience and expertise to arrive at the idea you want to communicate.
The problem is that the factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire during the Telling Others stage. When you want to share your message, your expertise gets in the way. You tend to communicate as if your audience were you.
I’m noticing this every time I try to explain to my parents and relatives what I do for work. When I hear “Ok…uhm…sounds fun!” I know that I failed to get the message across.
There are only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The first is not to learn anything, which isn’t really an option. The second is to take your ideas and transform them using the following 6 principles.
What makes ideas sticky? 6 principles
Chip and Dan came up with a nifty acronym for the formula that makes messages sticky: SUCCESs, which stands for:
Simple – Unexpected – Concrete – Credible – Emotional – Stories
Let’s look into each principle in detail.
1. Simple
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
To make a message “simple,” you have to find its core, stripping it down to its most critical essence. You might have to discard a lot of great insights to let the most important one shine.
But that doesn’t mean dumbing your message down or reducing it to a sound bite. Sticky ideas are simple yet still profound. The Golden Rule is a great example: a one-sentence statement so thoughtful that one could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.
Another example is proverbs like “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” This message warns us against giving up a sure thing for something speculative. A simple, compact statement provides guidance in a complex situation.
How you can apply this principle in practice:
- Be careful not to “bury the lead.” Start with what’s most important and interesting. Journalists present information in decreasing order of importance because people’s attention tends to taper off.
- Don’t be tempted to tell people everything you know at once. Give them just enough information to be useful. Then a little more, and a little more.
- Use analogies to get your point across. They borrow from concepts that your audience already knows to illustrate your argument. For example, when explaining what your new business does, you can use analogies such as “Uber for real estate” or “Facebook for dentists” so that people can more easily picture what you do.
2. Unexpected
“If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it.”
Now that you have a simple idea, how do you get people to pay attention to it?
The most basic way is to break a pattern. We adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns of stimulation around us. Just imagine scrolling through your Facebook feed. You automatically tune out anything you’ve seen a billion times before.
How do we break a pattern? By using surprise to get attention and interest to keep attention. Surprising information sticks to our mind because it makes us think more. That extra effort burns unexpected events into our memory.
After finding the core message that you need to communicate, figure out what’s counterintuitive about it. Are there any unexpected implications? Why isn’t it common sense already? Then communicate your message so that it breaks your audience’s established pattern and helps them make sense of the new information.
How you can apply this principle in practice:
- Since common sense is the enemy of sticky messages, you have to expose the parts of your idea that are uncommon sense.
- Introduce mystery to get people to stick with you through a more complex message. What will happen next? How will it turn out? People will want answers to these questions, and that desire keeps them interested. For example, challenging your team to predict how customers reacted to a new version of your product will keep them more engaged compared to just presenting the outcome of a survey.
- Create curiosity by exposing a knowledge gap. First, tell your audience something they already know. Then hint that they’re missing a critical piece of information. Now, they’ll have to find out. It’s like an itch we need to scratch. That’s why headlines like “This is why you’re not seeing an ROI on your marketing” work so well.
3. Concrete
“Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.”
Why does so much business communication go awry? Because mission statements, strategies, and marketing messages are often kept so ambiguous that they become meaningless. Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it.
Our brains are wired to remember concrete information. But what makes something “concrete”? Vivid details do – like a crisp white envelope with a bright red IRS stamp lying on top of your MacBook Air. We perceive something as concrete when we can examine it with our senses.
Why does that work? Think of your memory as velcro. Your brain is made up of millions of little loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to your brain and become a memory.
Besides being easier to remember, concrete messages have another advantage. Abstract statements may be interpreted differently by the people around you. But with concrete examples, everyone feels comfortable that they’re talking about the same thing.
How you can apply this principle in practice:
- Remind yourself that other people don’t necessarily know what you know. Always double-check that you’re on common ground.
- Avoid lofty industry jargon and acronyms. It might sound cool, but simple terms are more likely to get your point across.
- When explaining an abstract concept, always provide at least one real-life example.
4. Credible
Why do we believe certain ideas? It’s because our parents and friends believe the same. Or we’ve been told by authorities. Or our own experiences have taught us so.
When we’re trying to persuade an audience to believe a new idea, we’re fighting an uphill battle against a lifetime of personal experiences and societal influences. To win this battle, our messages have to be credible.
4 ways to add credibility to your message and how to use that in practice:
The first reliable source of credibility is having an authority deliver your message. For example, a known expert or influencer in your industry could endorse your product. That works because we tend to trust the recommendations of people whom we want to be like.
But that’s not always feasible. Luckily, having one of your customers tell a story can have the same impact. Chip and Dan found that “it can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as authorities.” A message from a fellow bird watcher or project manager (whoever your audience is) is relatable and can be trusted.
Sometimes, you don’t have an external authority who can vouch for your message. In that case, your message needs “internal credibility.” You can achieve this by using vivid details in your argument. That’s where the power of concrete examples shines again. Including statistics is another option. But don’t just cite a boring number, bring the statistic to life. For example, instead of saying 230 miles, say the distance between New York and Washington, DC.
You have one more source of credibility at your disposal: your audience. When you’re making a claim, ask them to test it for themselves. This is called a “testable credential.” For example, if you’re saying that project managers can set up a new project in less than 5 minutes in your software, let them try it out and prove you right.
5. Emotional
“For people to take action, they have to care.”
And how do you get people to care about your ideas? By making them feel something. Chip and Dan suggest two ways to do that:
The first is to invoke self-interest by suggesting to your audience that there’s something they want. You’ve always gotta answer “What’s in it for me?” But what they want isn’t always obvious. Most messages stay on the surface level and fall flat. You’ve got to dig deeper for the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t really want a drill. They want a hole in the wall so they can hang their kids’ pictures.
You don’t have to go as far as promising riches and ending all of their life problems. Often, it’s enough to offer a reasonable benefit that your audience can easily imagine themselves enjoying. The tangibility, rather than the magnitude of the benefits, makes people care.
The second option is appealing to your audience’s identity. This is based on the notion that people not only make decisions based on self-interest but also on identity. Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation? We all have an ideal self-image in our heads and want to get closer to it.
6. Stories
“A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from abstract prose.”
So far, we’ve seen that credible ideas make people believe and emotional ideas make people care. How do we finally get people to act on our ideas? By telling stories.
The power of stories is twofold: They provide simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act).
The first benefit is simulation. When we mentally rehearse a situation, we tend to perform better when we encounter that situation in real life. This works because when we imagine events, we evoke the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. Studies quoted in the book state that mental practice alone produces as much as two-thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.
That means stories act as a kind of mental flight simulator. For example, by telling a story of how one of your customers has succeeded, your audience can imagine themselves living a new, better life. They’re mentally getting ready to do it themselves.
The second payoff that stories provide is inspiration, which in turn drives action. When it comes to inspirational stories, there are three basic plots:
- The challenge plot: These are the underdog or rags-to-riches stories where willpower and tenacity overcome adversity. A protagonist beats a challenge and succeeds. These stories inspire us by appealing to our perseverance and courage. They make us want to work harder, take on new challenges, overcome obstacles.
- The connection plot: In these stories, people manage to bridge a gap, be it racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise. They inspire us to help one another, be more tolerant, and work together.
- The creativity plot: These are the MacGyver stories, where someone achieves a mental breakthrough, solves a long-standing puzzle, or attacks a problem in an innovative way. They make us want to do something different, to be creative, and experiment with new approaches.
Hearing a story switches people into problem-solving mode, lets them imagine new possibilities while combating skepticism. While making an argument invites people to judge it, debate it, and criticize it, stories involve people in an idea. The book lists even more advantages of stories than I can include here.
The quickest way to make your messages stick
For your message to really stick, it’s got to make the audience:
- Pay attention
- Understand and remember it
- Agree/Believe it
- Care
- Be able to act on it
The quickest way to achieve that is by delivering your idea through a story filled with concrete examples. If there’s one thing to remember from Made to Stick, it’s that abstraction always loses against concreteness.
