Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

Compact ideas help people learn and remember a core message. But they may be even more important when it comes time to help people act properly, particularly in an environment where they have to make lots of choices.

Our messages have to be compact, because we can learn and remember only so much information at once.

We’ve seen that compact ideas are stickier, but that compact ideas alone aren’t valuable—only ideas with profound compactness are valuable. So, to make a profound idea compact you’ve got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. And how do you do that? You use flags. You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what’s already there.

If simple ideas are staged and layered correctly, they can very quickly become complex.

Psychologists define schema as a collection of generic properties of a concept or category. Schemas consist of lots of prerecorded information stored in our memories.

schemas enable profound simplicity—is critical. Good teachers intuitively use lots of schemas. Economics teachers, for instance, start with compact, stripped-down examples that can be understood by students who have no preexisting economics schemas.

Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials. In school, lots of science courses are taught by clever uses of schemas.

The use of schemas can sometimes involve a somewhat slower route to the “real truth.”

If a message can’t be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.

An accurate but useless idea is still useless.

We discussed the Curse of Knowledge in the introduction—the difficulty of remembering what it was like not to know something. Accuracy to the point of uselessness is a symptom of the Curse of Knowledge.

People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies derive their power from schemas: A pomelo is like a grapefruit.

Analogies make it possible to understand a compact message because they invoke concepts that you already know.

High-concept pitches are Hollywood’s version of core proverbs. Like most proverbs, they tap the power of analogy. By invoking schemas that already exist (e.g., what the movie Jaws is like), the proverbs radically accelerate the learning process for people working on a brand-new movie.

Some analogies are so useful that they don’t merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking. For example, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has been central to the insights generated by cognitive psychologists during the past fifty years. It’s easier to define how a computer works than to define how the brain works.

Good metaphors are “generative.” The psychologist Donald Schon introduced this term to describe metaphors that generate “new perceptions, explanations, and inventions.” Many simple sticky ideas are actually generative metaphors in disguise. For example, Disney calls its employees “cast members.”

Generative metaphors and proverbs both derive their power from a clever substitution: They substitute something easy to think about for something difficult. The proverb “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush” gives us a tangible, easily processed statement that we can use for guidance in complex, emotionally fraught situations. Generative metaphors perform a similar role.

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.

Surprise gets our attention. Some naturally sticky ideas propose surprising “facts”:

Interest keeps our attention. There are classes of sticky ideas that maintain our interest over time.

So if emotions have biological purposes, then what is the biological purpose of surprise? Surprise jolts us to attention. Surprise is triggered when our schemas fail, and it prepares us to understand why the failure occurred. When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.

Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking sears unexpected events into our memories. Surprise gets our attention. Sometimes the attention is fleeting, but in other cases surprise can lead to enduring attention. Surprise can prompt us to hunt for underlying causes, to imagine other possibilities, to figure out how to avoid surprises in the future.

Going for a big surprise, though, can cause a big problem. It’s easy to step over the line into gimmickry.

In this sense, the wolves ad is the opposite of the Enclave ad. Both ads contain powerful surprises, but only the Enclave ad uses that surprise to reinforce its core message. In Chapter 1 we discussed the importance of finding the core in your ideas. Using surprise in the service of a core message can be extremely powerful.

What we see now is that surprise isn’t enough. We also need insight. To be surprising, an event can’t be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “postdictable.” The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not something you would have seen coming.

The emotion of surprise is designed to focus our attention on the failure, so that we can improve our guessing machines for the future. Then we drew a distinction between gimmicky surprise, like dot-com ads, and meaningful post-dictable surprise.

Here is the bottom line for our everyday purposes: If you want your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing machine and then fix it.

The easiest way to avoid gimmicky surprise and ensure that your unexpected ideas produce insight is to make sure you target an aspect of your audience’s guessing machines that relates to your core message.

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.

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.

There’s no danger that the stories will feel gimmicky, because the surprise is followed by insight—the stories tell us what it means to be a good Nordstrom employee. It’s uncommon sense in the service of a core message.

What made this idea work? First, the teacher knew that the students had a defective schema of journalism, and he knew how it was defective. Second, he made them publicly commit to their defective models with the “write the lead” assignment. Then he pulled the rug out from under them with a well-structured surprise. By revealing the right lead—“There will be no school next Thursday”—he took their mental models, gave them a swift kick, and made them work better.

PUNCH LINE: The best way to get people’s attention is to break their existing schemas directly.

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.”

So, by using mysteries, teachers don’t just heighten students’ interest in the day’s material; they train them to think like scientists.

Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment but from an unexpected journey. We know where we’re headed—we want to solve the mystery—but we’re not sure how we’ll get there.

McKee says, “Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.”

What will happen next? How will it turn out? We want to answer these questions, and that desire keeps us interested.

The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge.

PUNCH LINE: To hold people’s interest, we can use the gap theory of curiosity to our advantage. A little bit of mystery goes a long way.

The gap theory relies on our ability to point out things that people don’t know. One complication is that people tend to think they know a lot. Research has shown that we are typically overconfident about how much we know.

If people believe they know everything, it’s hard to make the gap theory work. Fortunately, there are strategies for combating overconfidence.

Making people commit to a prediction can help prevent overconfidence.

If curiosity arises from knowledge gaps, we might assume that when we know more, we’ll become less curious because there are fewer gaps in our knowledge. But Loewenstein argues that the opposite is true. He says that as we gain information we are more and more likely to focus on what we don’t know.

Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge. But what if there’s not much knowledge there to begin with?

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. It’s no accident that mystery novelists and crossword-puzzle writers give us clues. When we feel that we’re close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to the finish.

Ibuka inspired years of effort because he came up with an unexpected idea that challenged hundreds of engineers to do their best work.

Both create insight. Rather than leading us along a plodding route from one incremental step to the next, the ideas give us a sudden, dramatic glimpse of how the world might unfold. And not just how but why.