Made to Stick: Earworms for your brain

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

In a world filled with forgettable crap, how do you capture attention?

It’s easy.

Think: ever had an earworm for the brain? That’s a sticky idea… an idea that gets in your head and won’t leave you alone. Just make your idea sticky, and people have to remember. They can’t not.

Sweet!

That’s an excellent question and I’m so happy you asked.

Like a well-crafted pop song, sticky ideas have several characteristics in common. Even luckier, in “Made to Stick,” Chip and Dan Heath explain why sticky ideas stick in our heads (whether we want them stuck or not).

Since I’d just love to infect your brain with earworms such as “Website In A Weekend” and “Web Zero to Web Hero in 1 Weekend,” I spent a pleasant afternoon in early April 2009 reading Made to Stick. This a readable book. I took notes while in staying a house with 19 people (& kids!) on a recent weekend getaway to Sacred Springs in Dunsmuir California.

I really enjoyed how the Heaths (brothers) used the principles of “Made to Stick” to bootstrap the book. That is, the book demonstrates as well as explains the 6 characteristics of stickiness.

Make your idea sticky

If you’re interested in what makes real products take hold in people’s minds, and stay in people’s minds year in and year out, you will learn a lot from Made to Stick:

• After years of study, Chip and Dan found that 6 simple characteristics are common to all sticky ideas. Chip and Dan break the Stickiness Principle into two simple steps, and walk you through the 6 point SUCCES checklist.

  The SUCCES checklist is worth the price of this book all by itself… but I’m going to give it to you right here. This is all you need:

  1. Simplicity
  2. Unexpectedness
  3. Concreteness
  4. Credibility
  5. Emotions
  6. Stories
• Just knowing the 6 principles of stickiness may give you an instant epiphany for a creative breakthrough, giving you enough information to continue a project… or drop a project that you now know won’t stick.
• How finding your core message will shatter “decision paralysis” (AKA The Paralysis of Analysis) and let you (and your team) prioritize quickly and effectively to increase your stickiness.
• Understanding psychological schemas, as explained by the Heaths, lets you strip your ideas down to their simplest, most elegant forms. Schemas give your audience or customers a way to instantly recall your idea far into the future.
• How the principle of Compactness helps your audience store your big idea in their memory using a “flag” to leverage common knowledge, amplifying their understanding… using what they already know.
• Learn the principle of “post-dictability” to give your customers a sensation of satisfaction resulting from that “Aha!” moment your idea causes.
• How knowing already what a grapefruit is can be critical for understanding the whole concept of stickiness.
• Discover how the “Curse of Knowledge” holds you back from creative breakthroughs, and how you can break this curse resulting in simpler, clearer ideas and communication.

I thoroughly recommend Made to Stick, without any reservation. I will be using it for reference on my next product, and have already started to help a client implement stickiness principles for his software application service. Make sure to read the reviews on the Amazon web page as well!

Sticky web stuff

Businesses – and blogs – small to large spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out how to attach a sticky idea to a product. Usually without much success. Occasionally with smashing success.

What’s your sticky idea?

Leave a comment or send me an email, and I’ll post the first three right here. Use the 6 point SUCCES model:

Who’s first?

1. Sticky idea #1: That Pink Limo.
   • Simple: That Pink Limo, 3 words, about as simple as it gets.
   • Unexpected: Pink. No really, pink!
   • Concrete: Limousines are definitely something you can see, touch, ride around in, that’s about as concrete as it gets.
   • Credible: Ok, maybe That Pink Limo fails here. Because it’s INcredible. But I’m playing semantic games… of course it’s credible, you can paint a limo any color you want.
   • Emotional: Pink separates the men from the boys… takes a real man to wear pink!
   • Story: Oh yeah… give me a Saturday night in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood with my buddies Deacon and “5am” (don’t ask), I guarantee we’ll have stories.
2. Sticky idea #2
3. Sticky idea #3

An earlier version of this article was first published on There Is No Box on April 2, 2009.