PDF Summary:Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

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Contrast the kidney heist story with a message from a nonprofit organization that begins, “Comprehensive community-building lends itself to a return-on-investment rationale…”. Anyone would be hard-pressed to remember and repeat it after even a few seconds. Such communications are the norm in many workplaces. They can’t compete with the kidney heist story in interest, but could well be the type of message you’re tasked to deliver.

You’ll find plenty of advice for successful communication: Start with a joke. Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it, then tell them what you told them. Or, make sure you understand your audience and tailor your message accordingly. But these tips don’t help you create and shape your message so that it sticks.

Shaping Ideas

We all have messages and ideas we need to deliver, but often struggle to get them across. For instance:

• Teachers must explain mitosis or introduce algebra so it’s understandable.
• Managers have to get employees to implement new company initiatives.
• Directors of charities need to present their missions in a way that makes people care about them and donate.
• Political candidates want to...

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The Commander’s Intent coordinates people’s actions, while allowing them to react to changing circumstances as they pursue a clear goal. Finding the essence of your message is like writing a Commander’s Intent: focus on the most important thing.

The Commander’s Intent at Southwest Airlines

Southwest Airlines is known for its obsession with finding ways to reduce costs. This goal has kept it profitable for decades and kept it ahead of its competition. But putting the cost-reduction goal into action requires communicating to thousands of employees what it means to them.

To do this, the airline has its own version of a Commander’s Intent, a simple message distilling cost reduction to its essence, which guides everyone’s actions: “Southwest is the low-fare airline.” CEO Herb Kelleher once gave an example of how it works. A marketing director proposed giving passengers on the Houston to Las Vegas flight a chicken Caesar salad instead of just peanuts. Kelleher’s question was: “Will adding the salad make Southwest the low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas?” The answer was no, so the salad idea was scrapped. The message works because any employee can apply the...

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When you surprise people, you nullify their ability to guess what’s coming next, or as the authors call it, “break their guessing machines.” When we realize we’ve guessed wrong (our schemas have failed), we snap to attention, which is a built-in biological response to prevent us from getting something wrong in the future. Our eyebrows go up, our eyes widen, and muscles tense as we stop everything in order to process where we went wrong.

An advertisement by the Ad Council triggered this response. The ad for a new minivan shows a father picking up his son after soccer practice and driving along attractive, tree-lined streets while the narrator describes the van’s features. The dad stops at an intersection, the camera cuts to the boy, who’s looking out the window, then the father pulls forward. Suddenly, the van is broadsided by another vehicle. The screen goes black and these words appear: “Didn’t see that coming? No one ever does. Buckle up—always.”

The ad surprises by defying people’s schema for minivan commercials (minivans deliver kids safely). Viewers are more likely to think about checking seatbelts before the next trip. Surprise makes us stop and think.

Surprise...

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The teachers taught abstract math principles by first creating a concrete foundation or context, which can be useful for communicating other kinds of messages as well. For instance, if you write a recipe instructing the cook to stir soup to a hearty consistency, it won’t be useful unless you provide context on what “hearty” means.

Immerse Them in the Story

Accounting principles, such as balance sheets and accounts receivable, became concrete when Georgia State University professors turned an introductory course into a semester-long simulation. Students participated in the “launch” of a business selling a new product called Safe Night Out or SNO, a tracking device parents could place in a teenager’s car.

The students first had to determine the idea’s feasibility, then set up a system for tracking production, sales, and delivery costs. They discovered the difference between fixed and variable costs, which are key accounting concepts that can be hard to grasp from a traditional lecture. They dealt with challenges such as cash flow and bounced checks, and an unexpected request to lease the devices rather than buying them.

The concrete approach to introductory accounting...

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The examples show that the amount and type of authority you need to make a message credible depends on the audience. Average people believed a bogus source in the banana scare example, but doctors doubted medical colleagues whose ulcer research challenged current thinking.

Fortunately, however, the ulcer research story didn’t end there. One of the researchers, Barry Marshall, got frustrated with the disbelief and added a layer of authority to the message that was harder to dismiss.

One morning, with colleagues as witnesses, he chugged a glass of water containing about a billion ulcer-causing bacteria. When he got extremely sick a few days later, tests showed his stomach lining was inflamed, which is the early stage for developing an ulcer. Then, he cured himself with an antibiotic. His demonstration prompted other researchers to build evidence supporting his ulcer finding, although it took ten more years for the National Institutes of Health to back antibiotics as a treatment for ulcers. Finally, ten years after that, Marshall and his colleague, Robin Warren, received a Nobel Prize.

Marshall’s message finally became credible when other researchers, prompted by his vivid...

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Other considerations in crafting a message with emotional appeal include: identifying the right emotion, using powerful associations, and appealing to self-interest or identity.

Identify the Right Emotion

Appealing to people’s compassion for children or animals isn’t complicated, but some messages and audiences are more challenging. In the following example, an organization called The American Legacy Foundation wanted to get teenagers to care enough to avoid smoking or to quit.

Success hinged on identifying the right emotion to tap. Anti-smoking ads sometimes try to make kids feel afraid by providing mortality statistics, which seldom works. But the foundation’s “Truth” campaign appealed to a stronger teenage emotion: resentment.

The ad showed a tractor-trailer pulling up in front of a building on a dark New York City street; a headline at the bottom of the screen identified it as “the headquarters of a major tobacco company.” Teenagers jumped out and started unloading and stacking white sacks labeled as body bags. After they finished, a teenager with a megaphone asked, “Do you know how many people tobacco kills every day?” The toll, depicted by the number of body...

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1. Unexpected: You can lose weight by eating fast food.
2. Concrete: The pants Fogle once wore, with their 60-inch waist, made the story concrete.
3. Credible: Fogle spoke from experience.
4. Emotional: Fogle’s story made people care about him.
5. Stories: His success against the odds is an inspiration.

How to Spot an Inspirational Story

While Subway’s national marketing agency missed the Fogle story at first, you can learn to spot inspirational stories to help your messages stick. Just as the majority of effective advertisements draw on a handful of sticky templates, inspirational stories have templates as well.

The popular Chicken Soup for the Soul books are collections of inspirational stories that have been around since 1993. The authors analyzed hundreds of them to understand what makes an inspirational story successful and found that more than 80 percent feature one of three basic plots.

The most common plots for inspirational stories are:

• Challenge—people overcome obstacles.
• Connection—people develop relationships across gaps.
• Creativity—people solve problems and inspire new ways of thinking.

Challenge

In a challenge plot, the protagonist...

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• They’re not getting it. Simplify your message and be concrete. Use a generative analogy or tell a story.
• They’re skeptical. Build credibility with relevant details. Use someone who can speak from experience.
• No one seems to care. Tell a challenge story or a creativity story. Appeal to group identity.

5) Remember that with sticky ideas, you can make a difference. Think of Jane Elliott’s lesson on prejudice, Floyd Lee’s mess hall, Barry Marshall’s ulcer demonstration, Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher. Normal people in everyday situations, who know how to make ideas stick, have a profound impact.