Top Quotes: “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” — Chip & Dan Heath

Introduction

“The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends that a normal diet contain no more than 20 grams of saturated fat each day. According to the lab results, the typical bag of popcorn had 37 grams.

The culprit was coconut oil, which theaters used to pop their popcorn. Coconut oil had some big advantages over other oils. It gave the popcorn a nice, silky texture, and released a more pleasant and natural aroma than the alternative oils. Unfortunately, as the lab results showed, coconut oil was also brimming with saturated fat.”

“SPI called a press conference on September 27, 1992. Here’s the message it presented: “A medium-sized butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings — combined!”

The folks at CSPI didn’t neglect the visuals — they laid out the full buffet of greasy food for the television cameras. An entire day’s worth of unhealthy eating, displayed on a table. All that saturated fat — stuffed into a single bag of popcorn.

The story was an immediate sensation, featured on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN. It made the front pages of USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post’s Style section. Leno and Letterman cracked jokes about fat-soaked popcorn, and headline writers trotted out some doozies: “Popcorn Gets an ‘R’ Rating,” “Lights, Action, Cholestero!” “Theater Popcorn is Double Feature of Fat.”

The idea stuck. Moviegoers, repulsed by these findings, avoided popcorn in droves. Sales plunged. The service staff at movie houses grew accustomed to fielding questions about whether the popcorn was popped in the “bad” oil. Soon after, most of the nation’s biggest theater chains — including United Artists, AMC, and Loews — announced that they would stop using coconut oil.”

“We wrote this book to help you make your ideas stick. By “stick,” we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact-they change your audience’s opinions or behavior.”

“Some myths that have stuck:

• If you flash your brights at a car whose headlights are off, you will be shot by a gang member.

• The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object that is visible from space. (The Wall is really long but not very wide. Think about it: If the Wall were visible, then any interstate highway would also be visible, and maybe a few Wal-Mart superstores as well.)

• You use only 10 percent of your brain. (If this were true, it would certainly make brain damage a lot less worrisome.”

“Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth.

The researchers, sociologists Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, studied every reported Halloween incident since 1958. They found no instances where strangers caused children life-threatening harm on Halloween by tampering with their candy.”

“It has even changed the laws of this country: Both California and New Jersey passed laws that carry special penalties for candy-tamperers. Why was this idea so successful?”

Principles of Stickiness

“PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY

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 the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS

How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise — an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus — to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep. students engaged during the forty-eighth history class of the year? We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge and then filling those gaps.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS

How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions — they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images — ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors — because our brains are wired to remember concrete data, In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY

How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don’t enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves — a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS

How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic “37 grams” doesn’t elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES”

“Here’s our checklist for creating a successful idea:

а

Simple

Unexpected

Concrete

Credentialed Emotional

Story.

A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs.”

“This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.”

“The Extreme Consequences template points out unexpected consequences of a product attribute. One ad emphasizes the power of a car stereo system — when the stereo belts out a tune, a bridge starts oscillating to the music, and when the speakers are cranked up the bridge shimmies so hard that it nearly collapses. This same template also describes the famous World War II slogan devised by the Ad Council, a nonprofit organization that creates public-service campaigns for other nonprofits and government agencies: “Loose Lips Sink Ships.””

“In 1999, an Israeli research team assembled a group of 200 highly regarded ads — ads that were finalists and award winners in the top advertising compétitions. They found that 89 percent of the award-winning ads could be classified into six basic categories, or templates.”

“When the researchers tried to classify these “less successful” ads, they could classify only 2 percent of them.”

Simple

“Be simple. Not simple in terms of “dumbing down” or “sound bites.” You don’t have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by “simple” is finding the core of the idea.

“Finding the core” means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea.”

“The person stammered for a minute, so Kelleher responded: “You say, ‘Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.”

Kelleher’s Commander’s Intent is “We are THE low-fare airline.” This is a simple idea, but it is sufficiently useful that it has guided the actions of Southwest’s employees for more than thirty years.

Now, this core idea — “THE low-fare airline” — isn’t the whole story, of course. For instance, in 1996 Southwest received 124,000 applications for 5,444 openings. It’s known as a great place to work, which is surprising. It’s not supposed to be fun to work for penny-pinchers. It’s hard to imagine Wal-Mart employees giggling their way through the workday.

Yet somehow Southwest has pulled it off. Let’s think about the ideas driving Southwest Airlines as concentric circles. The central circle, the core, is “THE low-fare air-line.” But the very next circle might be “Have fun at work.” Southwest’s employees know that it’s okay to have fun so long as it doesn’t jeopardize the company’s status as THE low-fare airline. A new employee can easily put these ideas together to realize how to act in unscripted situations. For instance, is it all right to joke about a flight attendant’s birthday over the P.A.? Sure. Is it equally okay to throw confetti in her honor? Probably not — the confetti would create extra work for cleanup crews, and extra clean-up time means higher fares.”

“Tversky and Shafir’s study shows us that uncertainty — even irrelevant uncertainty — can paralyze us. Another study, conducted by Shafir and a colleague, Donald Redelmeier, demonstrates that paralysis can also be caused by choice. Imagine, for example, that you are in college and you face the following choice one evening. What would you do?

1. Attend a lecture by an author you admire who is visiting just for the evening

Or

2. Go to the library and study.

Studying doesn’t look so attractive compared with a once in a lifetime lecture. When this choice was given to actual college students, only 21 percent decided to study.

Suppose, instead, you had been given three choices:

1. Attend the lecture.

2. Go to the library and study.

3. Watch a foreign film that you’ve been wanting to see.

Does your answer differ? Remarkably, when a different group of students were given the three choices, 40 percent decided to study — double the number who did before.”

“Compact ideas alone aren’t valuable-1only ideas with profound compactness are valuable. So, to make a profound idea compact you’ve got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. And how do you do that? You use flags. You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what’s already there.”

“Explanation 2 sticks a flag on a concept that you already know: a grapefruit. When we tell you that a pomelo is like a grapefruit, you call up a mental image of a grapefruit. Then we tell you what to change about it: It’s “super-sized.” Your visualized grapefruit grows accordingly.

We’ve made it easier for you to learn a new concept by tying it to a concept that you already know.”

“People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies.”

Unexpected

“The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern.”

“So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate — find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.”

“Cialdini began to create mysteries in his own classroom, and the power of the approach quickly became clear. He would introduce the mystery at the start of class, return to it during the lecture, and reveal the answer at the end. In one lecture, though, the end-of-class bell rang before he had time to reveal the solution. He says, “Normally five to ten minutes before the scheduled end time, some students start preparing to leave. You know the signals-pencils are put away, notebooks folded, backpacks zipped up.” This time, though, the class was silent. “After the bell rang, no one moved. In fact, when I tried to end the lecture without revealing the mystery, I was pelted with protests.” He said he felt as if he’d discovered dynamite.”

“In McKee’s view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point. “Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. The audience wonders, What will happen next? and How will it turn out? The answer to this will not arrive until the Climax of the last act, and so the audience, held by curiosity, stays put.””

“One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Lowenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. We can pose a question or puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something they don’t. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps — What will happen? and Was I right?).

As an example, most local news programs run teaser ads for upcoming broadcasts. The teasers preview the lead story of the evening, usually in laughably hyperbolic terms: “There’s a new drug sweeping the teenage community — and it may be in your own medicine cabinet!” “Which famous local restaurant was just cited — for slime in the ice machine?” “There’s an invisible chemical in your home — and it may be killing you right now!”

These are sensationalist examples of the gap theory. They work because they tease you with something that you don’t know — in fact, something that you didn’t care about at all, until you found out that you didn’t know it.”

“To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?””

“Making people commit to a prediction can help prevent overconfidence. Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, came up with a pedagogical innovation known as “concept testing.” Every so often in his classes, Mazur will pose a conceptual question and then ask his students to vote publicly on the answer. The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.

Overconfident people are more likely to recognize a knowledge gap when they realize that others disagree with them. Nancy Lowry and David Johnson studied a teaching environment where fifth and sixth graders were assigned to interact on a topic. With one group, the discussion was led in a way that fostered a consensus. With the second group, the discussion was designed to produce disagreements about the right answer.

Students who achieved easy consensus were less interested in the topic, studied less, and were less likely to visit the library to get additional information. The most telling difference, though, was revealed when teachers showed a special film about the discussion topic — during recess! Only 18 percent of the consensus students missed recess to see the film, but 45 percent of the students from the disagreement group stayed for the film. The thirst to fill a knowledge gap — to find out who was right — can be more powerful than the thirst for slides and jungle gyms.”

“He says that as we gain information we are more and more likely to focus on what we don’t know. Someone who knows the state capitals of 17 of 50 states may be proud of her knowledge. But someone who knows 47 may be more likely to think of herself as not knowing 3 capitals.”

“Set the context and give people enough backstory that they start to care about the gaps in their knowledge.”

Concrete

“One hot summer day a Fox was strolling through an orchard. He saw a bunch of Grapes ripening high on a grape vine. “Just the thing to quench my thirst,” he said. Backing up a few paces, he took a run and jumped at the grapes, just missing. Turning around again, he ran faster and jumped again. Still a miss. Again and again he jumped, until at last he gave up out of exhaustion. Walking away with his nose in the air, he said: “I am sure they are sour.” It is easy to despise what you can’t get.

The fable above, “The Fox and the Grapes,” was written by Aesop. According to Herodotus, he was a slave (though he was later freed). Aesop authored some of the stickiest stories in world history. We’ve all heard his greatest hits: “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” “The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs,” “The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” and many more. If any story told this book is still circulating a few millennia from now, odds are it will be “The Fox and the Grapes.”

Even English speakers who’ve never heard “The Fox and the Grapes” will recognize the phrase “sour grapes.””

“California is one of only five Mediterranean climate regions in the world. (The others are the fynbos of South Africa, the matorral of Chile, the kwongan of Australia, and, of course, the Mediterranean.) These Mediterranean climate zones occupy only 2 percent of the world’s landmass but host more than 20 percent of its plant species. If you want to buy environmentally precious land, Mediterranean climates give you a lot of bang for your buck.”

“TNC named the oak savanna the Mount Hamilton Wilderness (based on its highest peak, the site of a local observatory). Identifying the area as a coherent landscape and naming it put it on the map for local groups and policymakers. Before, Sweeney says, Silicon Valley groups wanted to protect important areas close to their homes, but they didn’t know where to start. “If you say, ‘There’s a really important area to the east of Silicon Valley,’ it’s just not exciting, because it’s not tangible. But when you say, ‘The Mount Hamilton Wilderness,’ their interest perks up.””

“What makes something “concrete”? If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. “High-performance” is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things. In the “Unexpected” chapter, we talked about Nordstrom’s world-class customer service. “World-class customer service” is abstract. A Nordie ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete.”

“Experiments in human memory have shown that people are better at remembering concrete, easily visualized nouns (“bicycle” or “avocado”) than abstract ones (“justice” or “personality”).”

“On the day when they were in the inferior group, students described themselves as sad, bad, stupid, and mean. “When we were down,” one boy said, his voice cracking, “it felt like everything bad was happening to us.” When they were on top, the students felt happy, good, and smart.

Even their performance on academic tasks changed. One of the reading exercises was a phonics card pack that the kids were supposed to go through as quickly as possible. The first day, when the blue-eyed kids were on the bottom, it took them 5.5 minutes. On the second day, when they were on top, it took 2.5 minutes. “Why couldn’t you go this fast yesterday?” Elliott asked. One blue-eyed girl said, “We had those collars on….” Another student chimed in, “We couldn’t stop thinking about those collars.”

Elliott’s simulation made prejudice concrete — brutally concrete. It also had an enduring impact on the students’ lives. Studies conducted ten and twenty years later showed that Elliott’s students were significantly less [prejudiced].”

“Elliott turned prejudice into an experience. Think of the “hooks” involved: The sight of a friend suddenly sneering at you. The feel of a collar around your neck. The despair at feeling inferior. The shock you get when you look at your own eyes in the mirror. This experience put so many hooks into the students’ memories that, decades later, it could not be forgotten.”

“When Boeing prepared to launch the design of the 727 passenger plane in the 1960s, its managers set a goal that was deliberately concrete: The 727 must seat 131 passengers, fly nonstop from Miami to New York City, and land on Runway 4–22 at La Guardia. (The 4–22 runway was chosen for its length — less than a mile, which was much too short for any of the existing passenger jets.) With a goal this concrete, Boeing effectively coordinated the actions of thousands of experts in various aspects of engineering or manufacturing. Imagine how much harder it would have been to build a 727 whose goal was to be “the best passenger plane in the world.””

“The “presentation” that Stone Yamashita designed was an exhibit that filled 6,000 square feet. Yamashita describes the gist: “We invented a fictitious family called the Ferraris, three generations of them, and built an exhibit about their life and their visit to Disney World.” Walking into the exhibit, you began in the Ferraris’ living room, furnished with family photos. Each subsequent room followed the Ferraris through various scenes of their Disney World vacation. HP technology helped them buy tickets, sped their entry into the park, and scheduled their reservations for dinner. Another bit of technology helped them enjoy their favorite rides while minimizing waiting time. Back inside their hotel room at the end of the day, there was a final twist: A digital picture frame had automatically downloaded a picture of them as they rode a Disney World roller coaster.

Stone Yamashita, working with HP’s engineers, turned a message about the benefits of collaboration — what could have been a PowerPoint presentation — into a living, breathing simulation. Stone Yamashita put hooks into the idea of e-services. They took an abstract idea and made it concrete with an intense sensory experience.”

Credible

“Diarrhea is one of the leading killers of young children in developing countries, causing over 1.5 million child deaths annually. Diarrhea itself is not the cause of death, but rather dehydration, the loss of body fluid. Approximately three quarters of the body is composed of water, and if fluid loss exceeds ten percent of total body fluid, vital organs collapse, followed by death. If an episode is severe, as with cholera, death can occur within just eight hours.”

“As the director of UNICEF, he had enough credibility to keep people from questioning his facts. So Grant left the (uncontested) factual battle behind and fought the motivational battle. His bag of salt and sugar is the equivalent of Kaplan’s maroon portfolio in the venture-capital presentation: It helps the members of the audience bring their expertise to the problem. You can’t see it and not start brainstorming about the possibilities.”

“It can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities.”

“A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise.”

“By making a claim tangible and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.”

“In 1986, Jonathan Shedler and Melvin Manis, researchers at the University of Michigan, created an experiment to simulate a trial. Subjects were asked to play the role of jurors and were given the transcript of a (fictitious) trial to read. The jurors were asked to assess the fitness of a mother, Mrs. Johnson, and to decide whether her seven-year-old son should remain in her care.

The transcript was constructed to be closely balanced:

There were eight arguments against Mrs. Johnson and eight arguments for Mrs. Johnson. All the jurors heard the same arguments. The only difference was the level of detail in those arguments. In one experimental group, all the arguments that supported Mrs. Johnson had some vivid detail, whereas the arguments against her had no extra details; they were pallid by comparison. The other group heard the opposite combination.

As an example, one argument in Mrs. Johnson’s favor said: “Mrs. Johnson sees to it that her child washes and brushes his teeth before bedtime.” In the vivid form, the argument added a detail: “He uses a Star Wars toothbrush that looks like Darth Vader.”

An argument against Mrs. Johnson was: “The child went to school with a badly scraped arm which Mrs. Johnson had not cleaned or attended to. The school nurse had to clean the scrape.” The vivid form added the detail that, as the nurse was cleaning the scrape, she spilled Mercurochrome on herself, staining her uniform red.

The researchers carefully tested the arguments with and without vivid details to ensure that they had the same perceived importance the details were designed to be irrelevant to the judgment of Mrs. Johnson’s worthiness. It mattered that Mrs. Johnson didn’t attend to the scraped arm; it didn’t matter that the nurse’s uniform got stained in the process.

But even though the details shouldn’t have mattered, they did. Jurors who heard the favorable arguments with vivid details judged Mrs. Johnson to be a more suitable parent (5.8 out of 10) than did jurors who heard the unfavorable arguments with vivid details (4.3 out of 10). The details had a big impact.”

“If I can mentally see the Darth Vader toothbrush, it’s easier for me to picture the boy diligently brushing his teeth in the bathroom, which in turn reinforces the notion that Mrs. Johnson is a good mother.”

“What we should learn from urban legends and the Mrs. Johnson trial is that vivid details boost credibility. But what should also be added is that we need to make use of truthful, core details. We need to identify details that are as compelling and human as the “Darth Vader toothbrush” but more meaningful — details that symbolize and support our core idea.”

“Beyond War would arrange “house parties,” in which a host family invited a group of friends and neighbors over, along with a Beyond War representative to speak to them. Ainscow recounts a simple demonstration that the group used in its presentations. He always carried a metal bucket to the gatherings. At the appropriate point in the presentation, he’d take a BB out of his pocket and drop it into the empty bucket. The BB made a loud clatter as it ricocheted and settled. Ainscow would say, “This is the Hiroshima bomb.” He then spent a few minutes describing the devastation of the Hiroshima bomb the miles of flattened buildings, the tens of thousands killed immediately, the larger number of people with burns or other long-term health problems.

Next, he’d drop ten BBs into the bucket. The clatter was louder and more chaotic. “This is the firepower of the missiles on one U.S. or Soviet nuclear submarine,” he’d say.

Finally, he asked the attendees to close their eyes. He’d say, “This is the world’s current arsenal of nuclear weapons.” Then he poured 5,000 BBs into the bucket (one for every nuclear warhead in the world). The noise was start-ling, even terrifying. “The roar of the BBs went on and on,” said Ainscow. “Afterward there was always dead silence.” This approach is an ingenious way to convey a statistic.

Let’s unpack it a bit. First, Beyond War had a core belief: “The public needs to wake up and do something about the arms race.” Second, the group’s members determined what was unexpected about the message: Everyone knew that the world’s nuclear arsenal had grown since World War II, but no one realized the scale of the growth. Third, they had a statistic to make their belief credible i.e., that the world had 5,000 nuclear warheads when a single one was enough to decimate a city. But the problem was that the number 5,000 means very little to people. The trick was to make this large number meaningful.

The final twist was the demonstration — the bucket and the BBs, which added a sensory dimension to an otherwise abstract concept. Furthermore, the demonstration was carefully chosen — BBs are weapons, and the sound of the BBs hitting the bucket was fittingly threatening.”

“Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.”

“• Only one in five said they had a clear “line of sight” between their tasks and their team’s and organization’s goals.

• Only 15 percent felt that their organization fully enables them to execute key goals.

• Only 20 percent fully trusted the organization they work for.

Pretty sobering stuff. It’s also pretty abstract. You probably walk away from these stats thinking something like “There’s a lot of dissatisfaction and confusion in most companies.”

Then Covey superimposes a very human metaphor over the statistics. He says, “If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.”

The soccer analogy generates a human context for the statistics. It creates a sense of drama and a sense of movement. We can’t help but imagine the actions of the two players trying to score a goal, being opposed at every stage by the rest of their team.”

“They were left with 38 chemicals — but those 38 were “safe enough to eat,” according to McDonough. (Note the concrete detail — “safe enough to eat” — plus a statistic that establishes a relationship — a tiny number of good chemicals out of a larger number of toxic chemicals.)”

“McDonough’s new process wasn’t just safer, it was cheaper. Manufacturing costs shrank 20 percent. The savings came, in part, from the reduced hassle and expense of dealing with toxic chemicals. Workers no longer had to wear protective clothing. And the scraps — instead of being shipped off to Spain for burial — were converted into felt, which was sold to Swiss farmers and gardeners for crop insulation.”

Credential

“The spots implicitly challenged customers to verify Wendy’s claims: See for yourself — look at our burgers versus McDonald’s burgers. You’ll notice the size difference! To use scientific language, Wendy’s made a falsifiable claim. Any customer with a ruler and a scale could have verified the claim’s truth value. (Though Wendy’s advantage was sufficiently substantial that just eyeballing the difference was enough.)

This challenge — asking customers to test a claim for themselves — is a “testable credential.” Testable credentials can provide an enormous credibility boost, since they essentially allow your audience members to “try before they buy.””

“The researchers theorized that thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mind. When people think analytically, they’re less likely to think emotionally. And the researchers believed it was people’s emotional response to Rokia’s plight that led them to act.

To prove this argument, they ran a second study. In this study they primed some people to think in an analytical way by asking questions such as, “If an object travels at five feet per minute, then by your calculations how many feet will it travel in 360 seconds?” Other people were primed to think in terms of feelings: “Please write down one word to describe how you feel when you hear the word ‘baby.’”

Then both groups were given the Rokia letter. And, confirming the researchers’ theory, the analytically primed people gave less. When people were primed to feel before they read about Rokia, they gave $2.34, about the same as before. But when they were primed to calculate before they read about Rokia, they gave $1.26.

These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people’s charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.”

“A caption flashes at the bottom of the screen: “Outside the headquarters of a major tobacco company.” An eighteen-wheeler pulls up in front of the building, and a group of teenagers jump out. The teens begin to unload long white sacks marked “Body Bag.” They stack the bags on top of one another near the edge of the building. As the commercial progresses, the pile of body bags gets bigger and bigger. By the end of the ad, there are hundreds of bags in the pile. One of the teens shouts at the building through a megaphone, “Do you know how many people tobacco kills every day?” The daily death toll is revealed to be 1,800 — the number of body bags the teens have piled up in front of the tobacco headquarters.

This ad is part of a series of ads called the Truth campaign.”

“When the survey asked kids whether they were likely to smoke a cigarette during the next year, those who were exposed to the Truth campaign were 66 percent less likely to smoke. Those who were exposed to “Think. Don’t Smoke.” were 36 percent more likely to smoke! Tobacco execs must have taken the news quite hard.

It wasn’t just surveys that registered the difference. A study measured teen smoking in Florida, where the Truth campaign had its debut, versus the rest of the country. After two years of the campaign, smoking among high school students dropped by 18 percent and among middle school students by 40 percent. (About half of this decline may have been associated with a rise in cigarette taxes during the time of the study.)

What happened here? It’s the Save the Children example revisited. What is the “Think. Don’t Smoke.” campaign about? Er, thinking. It’s the Analytical Hat. Remember what happened with contributions to Rokia when donors were asked to think analytically before donating?

What’s the Truth campaign about? It’s about tapping into antiauthority resentment, the classic teenage emotion. Once, teens smoked to rebel against The Man. Thanks to the ingenious framing of the Truth campaign — which paints a picture of a duplicitous Big Tobacco — teens now rebel against The Man by not smoking.”

““Unique” used to mean one of a kind. “Unique” was special.

The researchers used a database to examine every newspaper article in each of the top fifty newspapers in the United States over a twenty-year period. During this time, the percentage of articles in which something was described as “unique” increased by 73 percent. So either there’s a lot more unique stuff in the world today or the “uniqueness bar” has been lowered.

Perhaps some skeptics, contemplating robot vacuum cleaners or Paris Hilton, would protest, “Hey, there is a lot more unique stuff in the world these days.” But at the same time that the word “unique” was rising in popularity, the word “unusual” was falling. In 1985, articles were more than twice as likely to use the word “unusual” as the word “unique.” By 2005, the two words were about equally likely to be used.

Unique things should be a subset of unusual things — unique (i.e., one of a kind) is about as unusual as you can get. So if there really were more unique things today, we should see more “unusual” things as well. The fact that unusual things are getting less common makes the rise in unique things look like a case of semantic stretch.

What we used to call “unusual” we now stretch and call “unique.””

“John Caples is often cited as the greatest copywriter of all time. He says, “First and foremost, try to get self-interest into every headline you write. Make your headline suggest to readers that here is something they want. This rule is so fundamental that it would seem obvious. Yet the rule is violated every day by scores of writers.”

Caples’s ads get self-interest into their headlines by promising huge benefits for trivial costs:

• You Can Laugh at Money Worries if You Follow This Simple Plan
• Give Me 5 Days and I’ll Give You a Magnetic Personality. . .Let Me Prove It — Free
• The Secret of How to Be Taller
• How You Can Improve Your Memory in One Evening
• Retire at 55

Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. “The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world’s best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world’s best lawn!).” An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures.”

“”Don’t say, ‘People will enjoy a sense of security when they use Goodyear Tires,’ Say, ‘You enjoy a sense of security when you use Goodyear Tires.’”

“The homeowners who got information about cable subscribed at a rate of 20 percent, which was about the same as the rest of the neighborhood. But the homeowners who imagined themselves subscribing to cable subscribed at a rate of 47 percent. The research paper, when it was published, was subtitled “Does Imagining Make It So?” The answer was yes.”

“Right now the pitch is

“You can sponsor Rokia, a little girl in Mali, for $30 per month” — a pitch that is already successful. But what if the pitch was expanded? “Imagine yourself as the sponsor of Rokia, a little girl in Mali. You’ve got a picture of her on your desk at work, next to your kids’ pictures. During the past year you’ve traded letters with her three times, and you know from the letters that she loves to read and frequently gets annoyed by her little brother. She is excited that next year she’ll get to play on the soccer team.””

“Syrek knew that the best way to change Bubba’s behavior was to convince him that people like him did not litter. Based on his research, the Texas Department of Transportation approved a campaign built around the slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas.””

“Another ad features Houston Astros pitcher Mike Scott, famous for his split-fingered fastball. Scott says that throwing stuff away is “the Texas thing to do.” He demonstrates his “split-fingered trashball,” hurling some litter into a roadside can, which explodes with a pillar of fire. Subtle stuff. The campaign featured athletes and musicians, most of whom probably weren’t household names outside Texas but were all well-known to Texans as Texans.”

“The campaign was an instant success. Within a few months of the launch, an astonishing 73 percent of Texans polled could recall the message and identify it as. an antilitter message. Within one year, litter had declined 29 percent.”

“During the first five years of the campaign, visible roadside litter in Texas decreased 72 percent and the number of cans along Texas roads dropped 81 percent. In 1988, Syrek found that Texas had less than half the trash he found along the roads of other states that had run anti-litter programs for comparable periods.”

“By asking “Why?” three times, the duo piano group moved from talking about what they were doing to why they were doing it. They moved from a set of associations that had no power (except to someone who already knew duo piano music) to a set of deeper, more concrete associations that connected emotionally with outsiders.

This tactic of the “Three Whys” can be useful in bypassing the Curse of Knowledge. (Toyota actually has a “Five Whys” process for getting to the bottom of problems on its production line. Feel free to use as many “Whys” as you like.) Asking “Why?” helps to remind us of the core values, the core principles, that underlie our ideas.”

“In 1954, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow surveyed the research in psychology about what motivates people. He boiled down volumes of existing research to a list of needs and desires that people try to fulfill:

• Transcendence: help others realize their potential
• Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences
• Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance
• Learning: know, understand, mentally connect
• Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status
• Belonging: love, family, friends, affection
• Security: protection, safety, stability
• Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort”

Stories

“Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulating future outcomes.”

“A review of thirty-five studies featuring 3,214 participants showed that mental practice alone — sitting quietly, without moving, and picturing yourself performing a task successfully from start to finish — improves performance significantly. The results were borne out over a large number of tasks: Mental simulation helped people weld better and throw darts better. Trombonists improved their playing, and competitive figure skaters improved their skating. Not surprisingly, mental practice is more effective when a task involves more mental activity (e.g., trombone playing) as opposed to physical activity (e.g., balancing), but the magnitude of gains from mental practice is large on average.”

“This is the role that stories play — putting knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day-to-day existence. More like a flight simulator. Being the audience for a story isn’t so passive, after all. Inside, we’re getting ready to act.”

“Where Challenge plots involve overcoming challenges, Connection plots are about our relationships with other people. If you’re telling a story at the company Christmas party, it’s probably best to use the Connection plot. If you’re telling a story at the kickoff party for a new project, go with the Challenge plot.”

“The third major type of inspirational story is the Creativity plot. The prototype might be the story of the apple that falls on Newton’s head, inspiring his theory of gravity. The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a problem in an innovative way.”

Conclusion

“For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it’s got to make the audience:

1. Pay attention
2. Understand and remember it
3. Agree/Believe
4. Care
5. Be able to act on it”

“The SUCCESs checklist is a substitute for the framework above, and its advantage is that it’s more tangible and less subject to the Curse of Knowledge. In fact, if you think back across the chapters you’ve read, you’ll notice that the framework matches up nicely:

1. Pay attention: UNEXPECTED
2. Understand and remember it: CONCRETE
3. Agree/Believe: CREDIBLE
4. Care: EMOTIONAL
5. Be able to act on it: STORY”