In Made to Stick, the authors propose the idea of idea stickiness, the notion of ideas that are understood, remembered, and have a lasting impact (they change audience opinions or behaviour).
How do we achieve this? Not through repetition (urban legends don’t need repeating). There’s six broad principles that all sticky stories have (like the kidney one, or razors in Halloween candy, or Subway Jared losing weight, or popcorn being fatty). SUCCES.
- Simplicity: Be a “master of exclusion”, “relentlessly prioritise”. Saying something short isn’t the point, nor are sound bites. Proverbs are ideal — ideas that are simple and profound (like the golden rule).
- Unexpectedness: Violate people’s expectations. Be counterintuitive.1 Use surprise to grab people’s intension, but keep that intension by generating interest and curiosity. Over the long term, engage curiosity by opening gaps in their knowledge then filling those gaps.
- Concreteness: To make our ideas clear, we can explain our ideas in terms of “human actions” and “sensory information”. Don’t be unambiguous in “mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions”. Use concrete images: ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors. In proverbs, abstract truths are encoded in concrete language. This ensures it means the same thing to everyone in our audience.
- Credibility: To make sure people believe our ideas, sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. People need to test our ideas for themselves. When building a case for something, we may instinctively look for hard numbers, but this is exactly the wrong approach.2
- Emotions: To make sure people care about our ideas, we make them feel something. We’re wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. The right emotion to harness is hard to figure out.
- Stories: To get people to act on our ideas, we tell stories. For every set of stories we have a more complete mental catalogue for how to encounter situations and respond better.
The framework:
- Pay attention — unexpected
- Understand and remember it — concrete
- Agree/believe — credible
- Care — emotional
- Be able to act on it — story
Footnotes
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”A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods!” - pp 16, Made to Stick ↩
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”In the U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between [Reagan and Carter], Reagan could have cited statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: ‘Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.‘” - pp 17, Made to Stick ↩