BtoB Book Buzz: Made to Stick

This book really sticks

What makes you listen to some people and not to others? What makes you remember some ads and forget others? What makes you read some articles and ignore others?

In Made To Stick, brothers Chip and Dan Heath explore what makes ideas sticky, memorable, unforgettable and repeated. Chip is a business school professor at Stanford, and Dan is a teacher and textbook publisher. They combine an entertaining blend of case studies and startling research to illustrate a practical, tangible strategy for communicating ideas so people will remember and act upon them.

From the engaging (“sticky”) introduction I find myself reciting repeatedly to friends (I guarantee you will remember it), to the very practical, almost check-list simple advice, Made to Stick is invaluable to anyone involved in marketing, advertising, journalism, politics or general management.

The brothers Heath give great examples in every chapter on how to improve your “stickiness” with simple strategies, the most important being their coined “SUCCES” acronym:

S simple – don’t lose your core message in a lot of pomp and circumstance
U unexpected – make your idea jump out and grab people’s attention
C concrete – keep it easy to grasp vs. mind boggling statistics or huge numbers
C credible – is your idea believable?
E emotional – people react to emotion, and it creates an empathetic bond
S stories – story telling is an age old form of communication

In other words, they suggest we “create messages that are simple and unexpected and concrete and credentialed and that contain an emotional story.”

Made to Stick is well researched, easy to read and hard to forget.