Made to Stick: Summary and Review

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath

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Review

This is the best book on how to communicate effectively, period. Ideas don’t matter unless they are remembered. This book shows you how to present ideas so they will not be forgotten.

You don’t have to be a genius to communicate ideas that make a difference. Good ideas are out there already, but many of them aren’t well known because they haven’t been properly communicated. That’s where you come in!

The book uses “SUCCES” as a template for communicating your ideas in a way that will be memorable and effective at convincing people to adopt them.

The authors use these principles throughout the book! So you have no choice but to remember what you read, and you can’t help but tell your friends about it.

I use the book’s principles every day in my writing, and it’s been one of the strongest influences on how to make my essays simple yet deep, tickle my readers’ emotions, and motivate people to take action.

Summary

SUCCES stands for:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Story

Simple

Readers will usually only remember one idea so we must prioritize the most important idea and reinforce it repeatedly in any message.

An example from the book is Southwest Airlines’ core message: “We are THE low-fare airline.”

It’s simple, but enough to guide the behaviours and decisions of all its employees. When debating whether Southwest should serve chicken Caesar salad on flights instead of just peanuts, you can ask: does serving a chicken salad make us THE unchallenged low-fare airline?

To make your idea compact and meaningful, you need to get into your audience’s heads. Create an association of what they already know with what you want them to know, like how physics teachers use pulleys, inclines, and frictionless paths to build schemas in their students’ minds, and then use those schema to explain complex theories.

You have the curse of knowledge, making it difficult to communicate because you forget what it was like to not know your idea, and you make assumptions about your audience that aren’t true.

To undo the curse, use analogies and metaphors to “substitute something easy to think about for something difficult.”

Disney uses a theatre metaphor for its employees by calling them “cast members.” Why?

• Cast members don’t interview for a job, they audition for a role.
• When they are walking around the park, they are onstage.
• People visiting Disney are guests, not customers.
• Jobs are performances; uniforms are costumes.

Employees intuitively understand how they should behave in situations not written in the rule book—they can’t take a break while in costume and in a public area because a theatre actor would never chit-chat or take a cigarette break on stage.

Unexpected

Surprise gets our attention and makes us stop and actually consider a message.

… to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable”. The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not something you would have seen coming.

After finding the core, figure out what’s counterintuitive about the message; communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines, then help them refine their machines.

If it’s common sense, it’s not surprising.

Interest keeps attention—you need to keep your readers hanging so they want to find out, either by creating mysteries or knowledge gaps.

But the surprise needs to make sense with the core, it can’t be just a gimmick.

A journalism teacher skillfully pulled the rug under his students’ feet, resulting in a surprise that was still memorable 30 years later. He asked his students to write the lead for a newspaper story based on these facts:

Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.

The students took the facts and condensed them into a single sentence:

Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento… blah blah blah.

The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment.

Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’”

“It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls. “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.”

Concrete

Numbers and statistics are easy to forget but concrete details you can taste, touch, hear, smell, and see are easier to remember.

It should be effortless to imagine what you’re saying—this is why specific examples work better than abstract explanations.

Concrete ideas work like Velcro. Your brain has loops and details are hooks—the more hooks, the more the idea seals into your memory.

Jerry Kaplan secured an investment in his business at a $4.5 million valuation for producing a smaller, more portable PC without using any fancy PowerPoint presentations or impressive graphs or tables—all he used was a simple maroon leather case as a model of a portable PC. How did he do it?

His pitch was:

If I were carrying a portable PC right now, you would sure as hell know it. You probably didn’t realize that I am holding a model of the future of computing right here in my hands.

Then he threw a maroon leather case across the table, to show how a future portable computer could be so inconspicuous you won’t even realize he’s carrying one.

His idea was simple, unexpected, and concrete!

Credible

We believe experts because they have authority; we believe people who we want to be like—if Oprah likes a book, it makes us interested in that book.

But you can still make people believe you even if you’re not an expert or a celebrity, if you can find trustworthy sources.

Your messages can also vouch for themselves.

By making a claim tangible and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.

In a simulated trial experiment, jurors assessed Mrs. Johnson’s fitness as a mother based on a fictitious transcript. Two groups heard identical arguments with different levels of detail.

One group received 8 arguments supporting Mrs. Johnson with vivid details and 8 arguments against her without extra details, while the other heard 8 detailed arguments against her and 8 pallid arguments supporting her. For example, a non-detailed pro-Johnson argument said that she always makes sure that her son brushes his teeth before bed but a detailed one would also add that the boy uses a Star Wars toothbrush that looks like Darth Vader.

Results showed that 5.8 out of 10 jurors judged Mrs. Johnson favourably when hearing vivid positive details, compared to 4.3 out of 10 when hearing vivid negative details.

These irrelevant vivid details shouldn’t have affected their judgments but they did. They boosted the credibility of the arguments. If I can visualize the Darth Vader toothbrush, I can imagine the boy diligently brushing his teeth in the bathroom, reinforcing the image of Mrs. Johnson as a good mother.¹

Statistics are credible, but if they’re too difficult to visualize, it won’t matter how accurate they are because they won’t stick anyway.

You can also outsource credibility by involving your audience in your message. Make them see for themselves, let them “try before they buy”.

In 1984, Wendy’s ran an ad campaign claiming that their burgers had more beef.

See for yourself—look at our burgers versus McDonald’s burgers. You’ll see the size difference!

This challenged the customers to test the claim for themselves, as they only needed to try eating the burger they might have already ordered anyway. Wendy’s revenues rose 31 percent during the first year after the ad was run.

Emotional

No matter how believable your idea is, if people don’t care, they won’t act on it.

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

If you’re communicating in an analytical and calculative way, it’s less likely the audience will think emotionally—and they’ll care less.

Charities don’t talk about food shortages in Africa, or how many orphans need help—they talk about one individual kid who needs your help. That’s because huge numbers are overwhelming.

It’s much easier to picture and empathize with a single hungry child and imagine that your donation could help them specifically than to think of millions—in the face of millions, what’s a few bucks going to do anyway? You become numb to the gravity of the problem.² You connect emotionally with individuals, not statistics.

Not everyone is altruistic, but everyone cares about themselves. You will be interested in something you can benefit from, especially if you can imagine yourself enjoying the benefits.

Homeowners in Tempe, Arizona were subject to a study in persuasion. The experimenters were trying to get them to buy a cable TV. The first group was presented with information about why buying cable is worthwhile: it will provide broader entertainment instead of paying for babysitters and going out, and the family can just stay at home and spend time together.

The second group was asked to imagine a detailed scenario:

Take a moment and imagine how CATV will provide you with a broader entertainment and information service. When you use it properly, you will be able to plan in advance which of the events offered you wish to enjoy. Take a moment and think of how, instead of spending money on the babysitter and gas, and then having to put up with the hassles of going out, you will be able to spend your time at home, with your family, alone, or with your friends.

They shifted the appeal subtly, making it more personalized by using the word “you”.

The homeowners who visualized themselves enjoying the benefits had a 47% subscription rate, but the ones who just got information about the benefits of cable only had a 20% subscription rate.

Always think about “what’s in it” for your audience.

But another thing people care more about than self-interest is identity. We all belong to some sort of group that defines who we are in society. If you can convince me that people like me do this, then I’m more inclined to do so as well.

Texas had a problem with littering. Their typical litterer was an “18-35-year-old, pickup-truck-driving male who liked sports and country music. […] We call him Bubba.” Bubba doesn’t see any obvious self-benefit in making the effort to throw his trash properly. Using a fear-based approach like fines or punishments could just backfire.

But these macho-looking men care so much about being a Texan.

They came up with the slogan: “Don’t mess with Texas”. Ads featured athletes and musicians who weren’t so famous outside Texas, but known to Texas as Texans.

The main message of the campaign was “Texans don’t litter.” This helped convince Bubba to stop littering because that’s not a Texan thing to do.

Stories

Stories are simulations that let you practice how to act so you know how to handle yourself if a similar situation arises in real life, like how pilots fly many hours in simulators before flying an actual plane.

The chapter also talks about 3 main kinds of story plots that inspire action, the Challenge, Connection, and Creative plots.

Challenge Plot

A challenge plot is about overcoming challenges. It appeals to our courage and perseverance. One example in the book is the story of a Russian woman named Rose Blumkin who, “at age of 23, finagled her way past a border guard to come to America. She couldn’t speak English and had received no formal schooling.”

In 1937, she used her $500 savings to start a furniture business—50 years later, it generated $100 million in annual revenue. The challenges didn’t end there, and at one point her competitors sued her for selling furniture at low prices (they thought she was doing it to undermine them) but she proved to the court how she could still profit despite giving huge discounts and “sold the judge $1,400 worth of carpet.”

We inherently root for Rose as the underdog, and we are interested in hearing her story because we hope things turn out well for her in the end.

Connection Plot

A connection plot is about people developing a relationship across a gap—whether racial, class, religion, or otherwise.

The phrase “good Samaritan” came from a story from the Bible about a Jew who was robbed and left for dead in the road. A priest passed by but did not help, then a Levite who didn’t help either, even though both are fellow Jews!

Then a Samaritan found him and showed mercy, even though at the time there was tremendous hostility between Samaritans and Jews.

This was told to teach people about loving your neighbour, that “a good neighbour shows mercy and compassion, not just to people in their own group.”

Creative plot

A creative plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, attacking a problem in an innovative way.

The famous explorer Ernest Shackleton faced tremendous odds in his explorations. If his men weren’t unified, the mission would likely fail. So to minimize negativity and avoid risking mutiny, he came up with a creative solution where all the whiny, complaining types would sleep in his tent and work on chores together, so he could be present with them and minimize their negative influence.

Unsticking an idea

How do you “unstick” an idea that you don’t want to spread?

Fight sticky ideas with stickier ideas.

McDonald’s had a problem where there were urban legends circulating that they were using earthworms as fillers in their burgers.

They tried refuting the rumours by saying the rumours are “completely unfounded and unsubstantiated.” But “earthworm in your meat patties” is a sticky message; it’s Simple, Unexpected, and Concrete.

In 1992, Ray Kroc, the CEO of McDonald’s, figured out a stickier idea. He said, “We couldn’t afford to grind worms into meat. Hamburger costs a dollar and a half a pound, and night crawlers cost six dollars!”

He used the principles of credibility (dollars per pound) and unexpectedness (We can’t afford to serve you earthworms) which made his message stickier!

Footnotes