Remember the old Steve Martin routine about getting small? It’s a great bit spoofing the way druggies giggle and cackle about getting high.
I like to get small. It’s very dangerous for kids, because they get realllly small. I know I shouldn’t get small when I’m driving, but I was drivin’ around the other day and a cop pulls me over … says, ‘Hey, are you small?’ I say, ‘No, I’m tall.’ He says, ‘I’m gonna have to measure you.’ They give you a little test with a balloon. If you can get inside it, they know you’re small … and they can’t put you in a regular cell either, because you walk right out.
In the media world these days — in advertising, the Internet, marketing, promotion, publishing, you name it — people are carrying on about getting “sticky.” Stickiness is the quality that products have when readers or consumers feel the need to linger a while. Rather than surfing to a new site, readers “stick” to a site that offers something intriguing and engaging.
Chip Heath and Dan Heath, a brotherly duo of biz-school professor and entrepreneur, have written the ultimate manual for getting sticky. Made to Stick outlines six qualities needed to make anything — idea or image, web site or ad jingle, catch-phrase or product design — stick.
1. Simplicity
If you argue ten points, nobody will remember even one. People easily remember two things (which set up a yin-and-yang kind of contrast) or three (which set up a triangle in which each corner affects the other two). And if you give them a mnemonic device, they can remember a string of ideas.
But to get people to remember, you have to work hard at simplifying your message. The Dale Carnegie Training offers a simple formula for giving memorable talks. It’s called the Action/Benefit speech. Talk about an incident, describing a specific action and the benefit it produced. Done well, these talks impart memorable wisdom. And advertisers love the format. Think of all the slogans that take this form: “Get Met. It Pays.”
2. Unexpectedness
As Aristotle noted 2,500 years ago, the reversal produces a powerful impact on the audience. When you’re expecting one thing, and something dramatic and different happens, you remember. In Story, his masterful guide for screenwriting, Robert McKee talks about opening and closing “gaps” throughout the picture. Give a character something he has to reach for–and then, just as he’s about to reach it, pull it away. And when you make the hero’s job harder, do it by surprising him with some demon or challenge that he had no idea was waiting for him.
3. Concreteness
Don’t use adjectives and adverbs. Ever have a friend who recommended a book or movie that was “interesting”? That word means nothing. Think of some memorable moments of popular culture. We remember the horse head in the film mogul’s bed in “The Godfather.” We remember Jake Gittes slapping Mrs. Mulwray in “Chinatown.” We remember Carlton Fisk waving his home run fair in the 1975 World Series and Bill Buckner coming up empty in 1986. We remember JFK and Reagan at the Berlin Wall, the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team surrounded by American flags, the screaming girls at Beatles concerts.
We know what a freshly mown lawn smells like. We know how good a beer tastes on a blazing summer day. Political and business people often don’t even know what concreteness is. They use vague general slogans, thinking they’re speaking to the most immediate concerns of their constituents.
When I worked as a planner for the City of Boston, I thought terms like “transit-oriented development” and “Emerald Necklace” were specific and concrete to the ordinary folks. I was puzzled when people complained how abstract our conversations could be. These wlords did not seem technical to me, but they did to neighborhood volunteers and activists. Words go only so far. Our most successful discussions of planning used maps and images of the streets, houses, business districts, parks, etc. The more concrete, the more people responded to our planning efforts.To be concrete, think of the senses — sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.
4. Credibility
People want to believe, but you have to tell them why they should believe. Everyone has a different tool. Academics love footnotes and statistical analysis. Sports fans also love stats, the more exotic the better. Lawyers like expert witnesses. Marketers pull a reversal and put the expertise in the hands of the consumer with guarantees and trials: “We know you’ll like it, but YOU decide.” Politicians often try to do the same thing, as when Ronald Reagan asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago.”
Demonstrations can also increase credibility. Beyond War, a peace activist group, uses the image of a bucket of bee-bees to demonstrate just how we have overarmed ourselves with nukes. Each bee-bee represents a nuclear warhead with the firepower of the bombs that demolished Hiroshima.Which raises another point about credibility. The more visual and specific, the stickier your claim. Celebrities often strengthen a campaign’s credibility. Now, celebs are often the least credible spokespeople for a complex issue. But celebrities who have established a strong emotional connection with audiences have also established trust, which is another word for credibility.
And so we listen to Richard Gere on Tibet, Meryl Streep on environmental health, Sting on global warming, and Mia Farrow on Darfur. Credibility can be manipulated as must as anything. Professionals use technical-sounding language to take the upper hand in debates. Lawyers, doctors, researchers, professors, even web-designers take refuge in gobbledygook language to bewilder their audience. When people cannot explain things in simple terms, you should be suspicious of their knowledge or motives.
5. Emotions
Make people feel something. People remember fear best of all. They also remember hope, when it’s connected to their fondest childhood hopes and dreams. Least of all, they remember the elements of a logical and systematic argument.
Think of how powerful emotions have been in American politics. Lyndon Johnson conjured the image of nuclear war in his mushroom cloud ads against Barry Goldwater. George Bush conjured a world of menacing rapists like Willie Horton carousing the streets if Michael Dukakis were elected president. Barack Obama warned about Republicans throwing granny off a cliff if anyone dared to reform Social Security. When people fear losing something, and a demon is connected to that fear, that’s what they remember before all else.
6. Story
More than anything else besides physical needs, humans need to tell and listen to stories. Stories provide meaning to everything from the most mundane to the most unknowable aspects of life. Stories give order to things that would otherwise feel chaotic and meaningless. Stories create a sense of wholeness. Stories also stretch the imagination, spurring people to think of achieving something beyond themselves.
Stories have, essentially, three plots: Challenge (David and Goliath conflicts, underdogs rising up, rags-to-riches tales, and triumph of will dramas), Connection (Good Samaritan, relationship that bridges a gap), and Creativity (Ingersoll Rand testing of materials, Shackleton’s dealing with rebellious crew members).
The Stickiness of Made to Stick
The Heath brothers, true to their message, make sure that their stickiness message is also sticky. Look over these six attributes of stickiness. They’re listed in an easy-to-remember mnemonic. The first letter of the six terms spells out the word “success”—almost, anyway.Let’s review (another critical tool to make an idea sticky):
S—Simple
U—Unexpected
C—Concrete
C—Credible
E—Emotional
S—Story
Got it?