Big Ideas

Something is sticky if it is understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior. The Curse of Knowledge is the major barrier to creating sticky messages. When conveying information or an idea, we tend to summarize or outline everything that we know. Unfortunately this is not an optimal format for stickiness. Similarly, other people won't necessary care or feel the same way about whatever it is you're talking about because they don't have the benefit of all the experience and context you possess.

Therefore the best way to make an idea or message sticky is to apply the SUCCESs framework. Make your messaging:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

Most of the book notes were copied from a summary created by the author. If you read through them you'll notice that a lot of the notes are just references to a particular story told earlier in the book (story references are generally italicized). This is a brilliant example of how only a simple reference to the story helped me to remember the complex idea that story was meant to illustrate.

Notes

What Sticks?

Kidney heist. Halloween candy. Movie popcorn.

Sticky = understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior.

Six Principles: SUCCESs

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

The Villain is the Curse of Knowledge

It's hard to be a tapper. Creativity starts with templates: Beat the Curse with the SUCCESs checklist.

Simple

Find the Core

• Commander's intent
• Determine the single most important thing: "THE low-fare airline."
• Inverted pyramid: Don't bury the lead.
• Beat decision paralysis through relentless prioritization : "It's the economy, stupid."
• Clinic: Names, names, names

Share the Core

• Simple = core + compact
• Proverbs: sound bites that are profound
• Visual Proverbs: the palm pilot wood block
• How to pack a lot of punch into a compact communication
• ~using what's there: tap into existing schemas
• ~create a high concept pitch: "Die Hard on a bus."
• ~use a generative analogy: Disney's "cast members"

Unexpected

Get Attention: Surprise

• The successful flight safety announcement.
• Break a pattern
• Break people's guessing machines (on a core issue)
• The surprise brow: a pause to collect information.
• Avoid gimmicky surprise - make it "postdictable."
• ~"The Nordie who ..."
• ~"There will be no school next Thursday"
• Clinic: Too much on foreign aid?

Hold Attention: Interest

• Create a mystery: What are Saturn's rings made of?
• Screenplays as models of generating curiosity.
• The Gap Theory of Curiosity: Highlight a knowledge gap.
• Use the news-teaser approach: "Which local restaurant has slime in the ice machine?"
• Clinic: Fund raising
• Priming the gap: How Roone Arledge made NCAA football interesting to non-fans
• Hold long term interest: the "pocketable radio" and the "man on the moon."

Concrete

Help People Understand and Remember

• Write with the concreteness of a fable. (Sour grapes.)
• Make abstractions concrete: The Nature Conservancy's landscapes as eco-celeberities
• Provide a concrete context: Asian teachers' approach to teaching math
• Put people into the story: accounting class taught with a soap opera
• Use the Velcro theory of memory: The more hooks in your idea the better
• Brown eyes, blue eyes: a simulation that "cured" racial prejudice

Help People Coordinate

• Engineers vs manufacturers: find common ground at a shared level of understanding
• Set common goals in tangible terms: Our plan will land on Runway 4-22
• Make it real: The Ferraris go to Disney World
• Why concreteness helps: white things versus white things in your refrigerator
• Create a turf where people can bring their knowledge to bear: the VC pitch and the maroon portfolio
• Clinic: Oral Rehydration Therapy
• Talk about people, not data: Hamburger helper's in-home visits and "Saddleback Sam"

Credible

Help People Believe

• The Nobel-winning ulcer insight no one believed.
• Flesh-eating bananas

External Credibility

• Authority
• Antiauthority: Pam Laffin, smoker

Internal Credibility

• Use convincing details: Jurors and the Darth Vader Toothbrush. The dancing seventy-three year old.
• Make statistics accessible: Nuclear warheads as BBs.
• The Human Scale principle
• Stephen Covey's analogy of a workplace to a soccer team
• Clinic: Shark attack hysteria
• Fin an example that passes the Sinatra Test: ‍
• ~If you can make it there you can make it anywhere.
• ~Transporting Bollywood movies
• ~"We handled Harry Potter and your brother's board exams."
• ~A business friendly environmentalist and textile factory that actually purified the water that fed it - and yielded fabric that was edible‍
• Use testable credentials‍
• ~Try before you buy
• ~Where's the beef
• Coaches: it's easier to tear down that to build up: Filling the Emotional Tank
• NBA rookie orientation: "These women all have AIDS"

Emotional

Make People Care

• The Mother Teresa principle: If I look at one, I will act.
• People donate more to Rokia than to a huge swatch of Africa.
• The Truth antismoking campaign: What made kids care was not health concerns but anti-corporate rebellion

Use the Power of Association

• The need to fight semantic stretch: the diluted meaning of "relativity" and why "unique" isn't unique anymore
• Transforming "sportsmanship" into "honoring the game"

Appeal to Self-Interest (and not just base self-interest)

• Mail order ads - "They laughed when I sat down at the piano ..."
• WIIFY (what's in it for you)
• Cable television in Tempe: visualizing what it could do for you
• Avoid Maslow's basement: our false assumption that other people are baser than we are
• Floyd Lee and his Iraq mess tent: "I'm in charge of morale".

Appeal to Identity

• The firemen who rejected the popcorn popper.
• Understand how people make decisions based on identity.
• Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?
• Clinic: Why study Algebra
• Don't mess with Texas: Texans don't litter
• Don't forget the Curse of Knowledge
• Don't assume like the defenders of the duo piano, that others care at the same level that you do

Stories

Get People to Act

Stories as Simulation (Tell People How to Act)

• The day the heart monitor lied: how the nurse acted.
• Shop talk at Xerox: how the repairmen acted
• Visualizing "how I got here": simulating problems to solve them
• Using stories as flight simulators
• Clinic: Dealing with problem students

Stories as Inspiration (Give People Energy to Act)

• Jared the 425 pound fast food dieter
• Spot inspiring stories by looking for three key plots
• ~Challenge (to overcome obstacles)
• ~Connection (to get along or reconnect)
• ~Creativity (to inspire a new way of thinking)
• Tell a springboard story: a story that helps people see how an existing problem might change. ‍
• Stephen Denning at the world bank: a health worker in Zambia‍
• You can extract a moral from a story, but you can't extract a story from a moral‍
• Why speakers got mad when people boiled down their presentations to stories

What Sticks

• Nice guys finish last. Elementary, my dear Watson. It's the economy, stupid.
• The power of spotting
• Why good speaking skills aren't necessarily good sticking skills: Stanford students and the speech exercise

SUCCESs Helps People To

• Pay Attention (Unexpected)
• Understand and remember (Concrete)
• Believe and Agree (Credible)
• Care (Emotional)
• Act (Stories)

Simple helps at many stage. Most important, it tells you what to say.