Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck

by Chip Heath

The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.

Our brain is designed to be keenly aware of changes. Smart product designers are well aware of this tendency. They make sure that, when products require users to pay attention, something changes

Suddenly the reporters realized that “Names, names, and names” was not consistent with their schemas. Whereas their previous schema might have been “Try to emphasize local angles when you can,” Adams had replaced that with “Names come before everything else, even my own profitability.” That’s a message that draws power from its unexpectedness.

So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.

Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other.

Nordstrom could simply tell its employees that its mission is to provide “the best customer service in the industry.” This statement may be true, but, unfortunately, it sounds like something that JCPenney or Sears might also tell its employees. To make a message stick, you’ve got to push it beyond common sense to uncommon sense. “Great customer service” is common sense. Warming customers’ cars in the winter is uncommon sense.

The value of the stories does not come from unexpectedness in and of itself. The value comes from the perfect alignment between Nordstrom’s goals and the content of the stories. These stories could just as easily be destructive in another context. The 7-Eleven management does not want to face an epidemic of gift-wrapping clerks.

Now, I don’t care about dust, and the makeup of the rings of Saturn is entirely irrelevant to my life. But that writer had me turning pages like a speed-reader.” Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. “You’ve heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?” he says. “Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.” By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting.

Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.

Gossip is popular because we know a lot about some people but there’s some information that we lack. We don’t gossip about passing acquaintances. Celebrity gossip is particularly tantalizing. We have a sense of who Tiger Woods and Julia Roberts are, but we crave the missing pieces—their quirks, their romantic struggles, their secret vices. Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge.

Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. “Here’s what you know. Now here’s what you’re missing.” Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next.

What makes something “concrete”? If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. “High-performance” is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things. In the “Unexpected” chapter, we talked about Nordstrom’s world-class customer service. “World-class customer service” is abstract. A Nordie ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete.

Yale researcher Eric Havelock3 studies tales that have been passed down by word of mouth, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. He notes that these tales are characterized by lots of concrete actions, with few abstractions. Why? The ancient Greeks certainly had no problem with abstraction—this was the society that produced Plato and Aristotle, after all. Havelock believes that the stories evolved away from abstraction over time.

Biology students try to remember whether reptiles lay eggs or not. Biology teachers think in terms of the grand system of animal taxonomy. Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience. And, because they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level. They want to talk about chess strategies, not about bishops moving diagonally.

So how do you fix it? Should both parties learn greater empathy for the other and, in essence, meet in the middle? Actually, no. The solution is for the engineers to change their behavior. Why? As Bechky notes, the physical machine was the most effective and relevant domain of communication. Everyone understands the machines fluently. Therefore problems should be solved at the level of the machine.

WHAT WE SHOULD learn from urban legends and the Mrs. Johnson trial is that vivid details boost credibility. But what should also be added is that we need to make use of truthful, core details.