Duct Tape Not Included

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is my favorite recent read, and I’ve read a bunch in the last few weeks.

Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz explains how to spread ideas, while Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good by Sarah Lacy tells the fall/rise of Web 1.0 and 2.0 through eyes of those entrepreneurs.

But Chip and Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick, is the foundation of it all: how to successfully express your ideas in a way that’s memorable and inspires others to act. Their main framework (which like most communicators/marketers comes in a kitschy acronym) is SUCCESs.

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Simple: Your audience isn’t going to remember 10 take-aways, but they will remember one that’s simple enough to recall and to survive repetition. The trick is to find the ‘right’ one, and it’s not as ‘simple’ as you may think. Idea creation goes back to your core message. Problem? The ‘Curse of Knowledge.’ It’s the inability to think from the recipient’s POV, if you already know what information you’re trying to convey.

Unexpected: Your message needs to surprise, provide more information or otherwise break the audience’s established paradigms. Most Web 2.0 savvy participants have seen dozens of logos/buttons with rounded corners, beveled 3D shape and a nice, shiny reflection. So making yet another rounded corner, beveled 3D box and nice, shiny reflection won’t get your logo noticed. See how much faster you read through the description the second time? Go back. I changed a few words, but I’m guessing most of you didn’t notice/care.

Concrete: Counterexample-

Ideas need to be concrete enough to understand and digest. The example above probably makes sense to math majors and engineers, but I have no idea how tay^rolf has anything to do with “peanut butter, jelly time.” The book has some lovely examples; mine comes from the 3G iPhone launch:

The lines around Apple & AT&T stores last week were bordering on ridiculous. You’d think the main goal was to “quickly and efficiently sell iPhones to everyone who wants one.” Nope. Because the two companies had different goals and seemingly no communication during the actual launch, customers complained. There was miscommunication (you can’t activate if you’re ‘flagged’ as a business customer but neither customer service staff knew that beforehand), long waits and server outages: both iTunes and AT&T activation. Apple wanted to drive as much demand through their stores are possible, so they had an incredible supply of 3Gs, while most AT&T stores only had a paltry 100 units or so. On the other hand, AT&T wanted everyone to sign up for service (and charge the $200 markup for those not upgrade eligible), so they bottlenecked purchase at the activation phase. If both companies could agree on a set of goals and convey them effectively to staff on both ends, hours of waiting and frustration would have been minimized.

Credible: The source affects if and how viewers accept ideas. You’re more likely to believe your comm professor than the Nigerian guy who’s emailing you about the millions inherited from some assassinated dead uncle. More intriguing is that ‘credible’ can change per circumstance. We ask for suggestions from friends but may rebuke endorsements from paid celebrities (are you really going to buy Lindsay Lohan’s new tights collection?). Conversely, we still read Perez Hilton to find out what celebrities are wearing, eating, dating and snorting as their drug of choice.

Emotions: By tapping into emotions, you can motivate people to listen and act upon it. How many of you feel a pang of guilt/pity when you see the adorable child on a Christian Children’s Fund commercial? How many even blinked when the news anchor told you President Bush attended the G8 summit to discuss poverty in Africa? I’m guessing the first generated more yes responses. Two reasons:

1. One vs. Many

• We can build a stronger bond with a single person than 12 million because we can’t quite grasp 12 million people. Is that 20 football stadiums? 200? They’re so far away. That one picture of a starving child really ‘drives the idea home’ and makes poverty/starvation a reality.
• It’s hard to imagine our $24/month helping 12 million people, but if it pays for school supplies, food and toys for a 8 year old Filipino child, sign me up (already done it ).

2. Emotions vs. Analytics

• Emotions bring people together by drawing empathy, while analytics cause us to reason and drive debate/argument. It’s a lot easier to get people to agree with you through emotion… on average.

Stories: Themes and story telling help engage and give context to characters. Great stories are often unexpected (David vs. Goliath), concrete (problem, solution) and emotional (go green! boo oil companies!).

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You’re probably thinking, why did I just reveal the entire book? I mean, didn’t I just write that I wanted to do a proper book review?

Well, I didn’t exactly write a review, more an abstract. Two, most of what I just wrote was covered in the 1st chapter! Turns out each concept is not so elementary, and finding an idea that covers all your bases? Even harder.

My goal is that you could just read this blog and walk away with some basic knowledge to start slightly altering how you communicate- emailing, calling, blogging, texting or otherwise. OR you could buy the damn thing and find out a lot more. Be entertained by the case studies (another term for stories) and use the handy outline in the back, when you need to reference something. (God, I sound like a saleswoman.)

Hope I did somewhat of a decent job. Now, it’s bedtime and then BlogHer tomorrow!

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Notes: Thanks to my amazing boss, Parry, who lent the book to me. Uh… it might be a while before I get it back to you, since I already have 2 other people interested in borrowing.