Making Ideas Stick

• 
  Chip Heath, Stanford University
• 
  Dan Heath, Duke Corporate Education

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There are cer­tain sit­u­a­tions impor­tant enough to use a check­list. Fly­ing an air­plane is one. Pre­sent­ing your idea is anoth­er. Here’s the check­list:

Mak­ing ideas stick requires them to be:

Sim­ple
Unex­pect­ed
con­crete
Cred­i­ble
Emo­tion­al
Sto­ries

Ideas that we want to out­live us need this treat­ment: not every idea does.

SIMPLE: Hard­est. Weed out the bits we care about to strip it down to essen­tials. Art­ful sim­plic­i­ty (iPod). If you say 10 things to a Jury, no mat­ter how good, the jury will remem­ber noth­ing. South­west Air­li­nes: a freak in longevi­ty terms. What do they do dif­fer­ent­ly? I can teach you to be the CEO of South­west in 30 sec­onds. SW needs to be THE low cost air­line. Test: Tra­cy comes in has looked at longest route to Las Veg­as, says cus­tomers get hun­gry. Pro­pos­al pitched to sat­is­fy the cus­tomer. But the ques­tion is Will That Make us the Num­ber one Low cost Air­line? If it doesn’t, (my words) screw cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion.

High-con­cept Pitch: Die Hard on a bus
Lost alien befriends alien boy to get home: ET
Jaws on a space­ship: Aliens

The high con­cept can shape the cre­ative choic­es all by itself. E.g. the space­ship in Aliens isn’t going to look like the Enter­prise because that’s not the mod­el for rick­ety sweaty claus­tra­pho­bic Jaws.

UNEXPECTED: Bun­ny with stuff on its head flash­es up on the screen. “Now nobody is pay­ing atten­tion” because he broke atten­tion with an unex­pect­ed image that broke a pat­tern.
Exam­ple of Ads that are great ideas but pro­duct is lost. Because the unex­pect­ed pat­tern break was not aligned with the mes­sage. Nora Ephron’s advice about how to write a lead, from expe­ri­ence of a teacher pre­sent­ing long sto­ry about a field trip to a col­lo­qui­um.

She tried to get the WWWW right, fig­ured the gov­er­nor was the most impor­tant ele­ment, wrote this:

“Gov­er­nor pat Brown, Mar­garet Mead, will address the bev­er­ly hils high school fac­ul­ty Thurs­day.…

The teacher said the LEAD was real­ly: “There’s no school next thurs­day.”

CONCRETE: Biz trav­eller accepts a drink, wakes up in his bath­room in an ice filled bath sees a stick­er says call 911, he does. Asked does he have a tube stick­ing out of his neck. He says yes, she says there’s an organ theft ring going on and he’s miss­ing a kid­ney.”

Why do urban leg­ends stick? They’re visu­al, con­crete. Not “the low cost car­ri­er”. Sub­way tried two ad strate­gies for sell­ing healthy junk food. One was the phrase 7 under 6, total­ly abstract. ‘(7 sand­wich­es under 6 grams of fat) The oth­er was Jared, a guy hold­ing a pair of pants that were huge and which he wore when he weight­ed 200 pounds more. 

Head­li­nes on Match.com

I can make you laugh
vs
The guy above me is mar­ried
The guy below me is a stalk­er

(deliv­ery vs promise)

Ath­let­ic Math Nerd look­ing for some­one to hum Sein­feld intro music with.

Pow­er of con­crete­ness is we start engag­ing with people’s minds.

EMOTIONAL: What makes peo­ple care? Tex­as Lit­ter cam­paign.

Typ­i­cal liter­rer is young 18–30 year old male prob­a­bly dri­ves a pick­up. They pro­filed him as “Bub­ba” and asked how to get him to care. how about woodsy owl’s Give a hoot, don’t pol­lute! Not gonna get bub­ba. Native Amer­i­can cry­ing at state of his river. Bub­ba thinks peo­ple who cry are sissies. But then they hit it: Don’t mess with Tex­as. Sports stars, Wille Nel­son deliv­er­ing the mes­sage that if you throw stuff out the win­dow, you are unpa­tri­otic.

81% drop in lit­ter across the state in 2 years.

Iden­ti­ty is more pow­er­ful than self-inter­est.
Iden­ti­ty is more pow­er­ful than self-inter­est.
Iden­ti­ty is more pow­er­ful than self-inter­est.
Iden­ti­ty is more pow­er­ful than self-inter­est.
Iden­ti­ty is more pow­er­ful than self-inter­est.
Iden­ti­ty is more pow­er­ful than self-inter­est.

The curse of Knowl­edge: When you know some­thing very well, it becomes very hard to pic­ture what it’s like NOT to know what you know.

Tap­pers and lis­ten­ers. Given a list of 120 songs one taps out the rhythm and anoth­er guess­es. When the tap­per taps it out, he hears the full orches­tral ver­sion with Mari­ah Carey on vocals. Of the 120 songs, 3 got guessed. But when asked what they think the chances of their lis­ten­er get­ting it right, they said 50% when it was in fact less than 4%. They were cursed by their knowl­edge.

Idio­pathic car­diomy­opa­thy.

Idio­pathic = Unknown caus­es.

Kennedy didn´t say Our mis­sion is to become the rec­og­nized inter­na­tion­al leead­er in the space race, using our capac­i­ty for tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion to build a bridge toward the future.

He said

“I believe that this nation should com­mit itself to achiev­ing the goal, before this decade is out, of land­ing a man on the moon and return­ing him safe­ly to the Earth.”
– Pres. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

How do you make peo­ple see that they have the curse of knowl­edge?

Put peo­ple in a sit­u­a­tion in which they need to pitch their ideas to peo­ple who they would not nec­es­sar­i­ly nor­mal­ly talk to: e.g. Non prof­its not pitch­ing to each oth­er in their own spe­cial­ized vocab­u­lary, but pitch­ing to pro­fes­sors or cafe­te­ria work­ers.

Expose the inter­nal spokesper­sons to the out­side audi­ence that doesn’t know their issue.

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