FEBRUARY 2007
Why Some Ideas Stick: It's Simple
Brothers
Chip, left, and Dan Heath coauthored Made to Stick.
Why do some ideas succeed while others fail? In the new book Made to Stick, a GSB professor and his brother, a corporate education consultant, teach you six principles to make your ideas stick. In the following excerpt, they explain the first rule.
A few years ago, the two of us realized we had been studying the same thing for years. Dan had co-founded an educational publishing company called Thinkwell, where, essentially, he enjoyed a crash course in what makes great teachers great. Chip, as a professor at Stanford, had spent about 10 years asking why bad ideas sometimes win out in the social marketplace of ideas. Our expertise came from different fields, but we had converged on the same question: Why do some ideas succeed and others fail?
In his research, Chip dove into the realm of "naturally sticky" ideas such as urban legends and conspiracy theories. Over the years, he's become uncomfortably familiar with urban legends like these:
The Great Wall of China is the only manmade object visible from space. (Think about it. The wall is not very wide. If it were visible, then any interstate highway also would be visible.)
You use only 10 percent of your brain. (If this were true, it would certainly make brain damage a lot less worrisome.)
The Kentucky Fried Rat ... (You can stop right there. Any tale that involves rats and fast food is on fertile ground.)
Urban legends are false, but many other naturally sticky ideas are true. As we pored over hundreds of sticky ideas, we saw, over and over again, the same six principles at work. We found that ideas that stick are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and they tell a Story. (A clever observer will note that these principles can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs.)
Let's consider one success story: the Subway food chain's ad campaign featuring a formerly 425-pound college student, Jared Fogle. Jared lost 200 pounds eating the company's low-fat sandwiches. He called it his "Subway diet," and Subway called it marketing magic.
Note how well the Jared story does on the SUCCESs checklist:
It's simple: Eat subs and lose weight.
It's unexpected: A guy lost a ton of weight by eating fast food!
It's concrete: Think of the oversized pants, the massive loss of girth, the diet composed of particular sandwiches.
It's credible: It has a kind of anti-authority truthfulness. The guy who wore 60-inch pants is giving us diet advice!
It's emotional: We care more about an individual, Jared, than about a mass. It's about a guy who reached his potential with the help of a sub shop.
It's a story: Our protagonist overcomes big odds to triumph. It inspires the rest of us to do the same.
It's hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. Coming up with a stickable idea like Jared and his diet can seem as difficult as losing 200 pounds. But if you are going to succeed, the first step, Simple, is essential; all the others depend on it.
What we mean by simple is finding the core of the idea. To find the core, you've got to weed out the superfluous and tangential elements. But that's the easy part. The hard part is weeding out the really important ideas that aren't the most important.
News reporters are taught to start their stories with the most important information. The first sentence, called the lead, contains the most essential elements of the story. After the lead, information is presented in decreasing order of importance. Journalists obsess about their leads. Don Wycliff, a winner of prizes for editorial writing, says, "I've always been a believer that if I've got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend the first hour and 45 minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything will come easily."
So why would journalists ever fail with their leads? A common mistake is for reporters to get so steeped in the details that they fail to see their message's core. This problem of losing direction, of missing the central story, is common enough that journalists have given it its own name: Burying the lead. "Burying the lead" occurs when the journalist lets the most important element of the story slip too far down in the story structure. The process of writing a lead—and avoiding the temptation to bury it—is a helpful metaphor for the process of finding the core. Finding the core and writing leads both involve forced prioritization.
In the abstract, prioritization doesn't sound so tough. You prioritize important goals over less important goals. You prioritize goals that are "critical" ahead of goals that are "beneficial." But what if we can't tell the difference? In fact, psychologists have found that people can be driven to irrational decisions by too many choices. Give people one good alternative and they will act on it. Give them two good alternatives and they ... delay, waiting until they have a clear way of making the choice. Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that's why finding the core is so valuable.
Dunn, North Caroline, is a small town about 40 miles south of Raleigh. It has 14,000 residents and its workforce is primarily blue-collar. The local diner is packed in the morning with people eating big breakfasts and drinking coffee. Waitresses call you "hon." All in all, Dunn is a pretty normal place, except for one fact: Almost everyone in Dunn reads the local paper, the Daily Record. As a matter of fact, more than everyone in Dunn reads the paper. The Daily Record's penetration in the Dunn community is 112 percent, which is the highest penetration of any newspaper in the country. What explains this remarkable success?
The Dunn Daily Record was founded in 1950 by Hoover Adams. Throughout his tenure as publisher, Adams has believed newspapers need to be relentlessly local in their coverage. In fact, asked why the Daily Record has been so successful, Adams replies: "It's because of three things: Names, names, and names." In 1978, frustrated by what he felt was an insufficient focus on local issues in the paper, he wrote a memo to his staff, explaining his views. "A local newspaper can never get enough local names. I'd happily hire two more typesetters and add two more pages in every edition if we had the names to fill them up."
Look at how Adams communicates his core message. He says he'd hire more typesetters if the reporters could generate enough names. This is forced prioritization: Local focus is more important than minimizing costs! He also speaks in clear, tangible language. Is there a staffer who won't understand what Adams means by "names"? Adams can't possibly be involved in the vast majority of decisions at the paper. But his employees don't suffer from decision paralysis, because Adams is clear: "names, names, and names." Do we run the inspiring human interest story from the wire service, or the boring city council meeting with public testimony on the roadway bond issue? The boring city council story. It has more names, so it wins.
Adams' "names, names, and names" is useful and memorable because it is concrete, but also because it is succinct. This example illustrates a second aspect of simplicity: Simple messages are core and compact. For thousands of years, people have exchanged simple, core ideas called proverbs. Cervantes defined proverbs as "short sentences drawn from long experience." The Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is so profound that it can influence a lifetime of behavior. The Golden Rule is a great symbol of what we're chasing: Ideas that are compact enough to be sticky and meaningful enough to make a difference.
Great simple ideas have an elegance and utility that make them function a lot like proverbs. We are right to be skeptical of sound bites, because lots of sound bites are empty or misleading—they're compact without being core. But the simple we're chasing isn't a sound bite, it's a proverb: compact and core.
Why do remote controls have more buttons than we ever use? The answer starts with the noble intentions of engineers. Most technology and product design projects must combat "feature creep," the tendency for things to become incrementally more complex until they don't perform their original functions very well.
The team that developed the original Palm Pilot, aware of this danger, took a hard line against feature creep. Jeff Hawkins, the team leader, wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle only four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists, but it would do them well. Hawkins fought feature creep by carrying around a wooden block the size of the Palm. Hawkins would pull out the wooden block to "take notes" during a meeting or "check his calendar" in the hallway. When someone would suggest another feature, Hawkins would pull out the wooden block and ask them where it would fit. Hawkins knew that the core idea of his project needed to be elegance and simplicity. In sharing this core idea, Hawkins and his team used what was, in essence, a visual proverb. The block of wood became a visual reminder to do a few things and do them well.
A great way to capture a core message in a compact way is to use analogies that invoke concepts that you already know. In Hollywood, $100 million movies can be green-lighted based largely on the strength of a one-sentence analogy—core ideas called "high-concept pitches." You've probably heard some of them. Alien was "Jaws on a spaceship." 13 Going on 30 was "Big for girls." Speed was "Die Hard on a bus."
If you've ever seen the hard-hitting movie Die Hard, the compact, five-word phrase, "Die Hard on a bus," pours a breathtaking amount of meaning into the previously nonexistent concept of Speed. Think of all the important decisions you could make, just on the strength of those five words. Do you hire an action director or an indie director? Action. Do you budget $10 million or $100 million? $100 million. Big star or ensemble cast? Big star. Target a summer release or a Christmas release? Summer. High-concept pitches are Hollywood's version of core proverbs. By invoking schemas that already exist (e.g., what the movie Die Hard is like), the proverbs radically accelerate the learning process for people working on a brand-new movie. If high-concept pitches can have this power in the movie world—an environment filled with 40 times the normal density of egos—we should feel confident that we can harness the same power in our own environments.
How do we find the essential core of our ideas? To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are. Coming up with a short, compact phrase is easy. Anybody can do it. On the other hand, coming up with a profound compact phrase is incredibly difficult. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. What we've tried to show here is that the effort is worth it—that "finding the core," and expressing it in the form of a compact idea, can be enduringly powerful.
This article is excerpted from Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath, GSB professor of organizational behavior, and Dan Heath, an education consultant, published by Random House, 2007.
FEATURES IN THIS ISSUE
- Work-Life Integration
- When Women at the GSB Were Few
- Why Some Ideas Stick: It's Simple
- Boomers Transplant to Nonprofits
- Father-Daughter Team Tilts with Quixote
pop quiz
WHAT WAS LOST?
In the 1992 Clinton campaign, campaign manager James Carville's famous proverb, "It's the economy, stupid." was one of three phrases Carville wrote on a whiteboard for his staff. Here's a trivia question: What were the other two? (Check your answer)
The other two phrases didn't stick. So should Carville have been pleased with the success of "It's the economy, stupid" as an idea? His phrase resonated so strongly that it became a powerful tool in framing the election. On the other hand, he got only one-third of his message across.
All of us tend to have a lot of "idea pride." We want our messages to endure in the form we designed them. But when our messages are altered by our audience, the question we have to ask ourselves is this: Is my audience's version of my message still core? We've discussed the importance of focusing on core messages—honing in on the most important truths that we need to communicate. If the world takes our ideas and changes them—or accepts some and discards others—all we need to decide is whether the mutated versions are still core. If they are—as with "It's the economy, stupid"—then we should humbly embrace our audience's judgment. Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators is not whether people mimic our exact words, it's whether we achieve our goals.
WHAT'S THE LESSON?
Each year in Chip Heath's How to Make Ideas Stick course, students are assigned to give a short speech to persuade their classmates on an important policy issue. Half the students are asked to make a one-minute speech to convince their peers that non-violent crime is a serious problem in the United States. The other half are asked to take the opposite position. Stanford MBA students tend to be quick thinkers and good communicators. No one ever gives a poor speech.
After each speech, the listeners rate the speaker. What happens, always, is that the most polished speakers get the highest ratings. No surprise, right? The surprise comes next. After distracting the class for a few minutes by playing a video, Heath abruptly asks the class to write down every single idea they remember from the speeches they heard.
The students are flabbergasted at how little they remember. Most of the seemingly polished messages of their classmates didn't stick. Interestingly, there is no correlation between speaking talent and the ability to make ideas stick. The people who were captivating speakers typically do no better than the others. The stars of stickiness are the students who made their case by telling stories, or by tapping into emotion, or by stressing a single point rather than 10.
Why can't these smart, talented speakers make their ideas stick? The first villain is the natural tendency to bury the lead—to get lost in a sea of information. The second is the tendency to focus on the presentation rather than the message.
Lesson? All the charisma in the world won't save the wrong message, as some Stanford students learn the hard way.