Melvin's digital garden

Made to Stick

CREATED: 201001271601 ** What sticks

  • Kidney heist. Halloween candy. Movie popcorn
  • Sticky = understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior
  • Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories (SUCCESs)
  • 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.
  • The pain of decision paralysis. Beat decision paralysis through relentless prioritization: “It’s the economy, stupid”, “Names, names, names.” *** Share the core
  • Simple = core + compact. Proverbs: sounds bits 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. The pomelo

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” *** 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?”
  • Priming the gap: How Roone Arledge made NCAA football interesting to nonfans.
  • 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 abstraction concrete: The Nature Conservancy’s landscapes as eco-celebrities.
  • 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.
  • 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 and 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
  • Find an example that passes that 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 the 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? Snapple supports the KKK?!
  • Coaches: It’s easier to tear down than 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 the one, I will act. People donate more to Rokia than to a huge swath of Africa.
  • The Truth anti-smoking campaign: What made kids care was not health concerns but anticorporate rebelling *** 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. 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?
  • Don’t mess with Texas: Texan’s 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. ** Story *** 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 repairman acted.
  • Visualizing “how I got here”: simulating problem to solve them.
  • Use stories as flight simulators. *** Stories as inspiration (give people energy to act)
  • Jard, the 425-pound fast food dieter.
  • How to spot inspiring stories. Look 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 *** Use 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: Standford students and the speech exercise.
  • A final warning about the Curse of Knowledge.
  • Remember how SUCCESs helps people to: ** Pay attention - Unexpected ** Understand and remember - Concrete ** Believe and agree - Credible ** Care - Emotional ** Act - Stories
  • Simple helps at many stages. Most importantly, it tells you what to say
  • JFK vs Floyd Lee: How normal people, in normal situations, can make a profound different with their sticky ideas.

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