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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Made to
Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath |
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Rating: |
**** |
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(Highly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Success In their new
book, Made
to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath give a big bow to the notion of stickiness
that Malcolm Gladwell explored in The
Tipping Point, and go on to provide one of the best books about
communication in years. The Heath brothers describe six qualities of an idea
that sticks: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotional
and stories, and give us the acronym SUCCESs as a way to remember. They add a
reference guide, and have a clinic section that compares two different
messages for each chapter. Here’s an excerpt, from Chapter 2, “Unexpected,”
pp. 66-69: GETTING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION No One Ever Does The television commercial
for the new Enclave minivan opens with the Enclave sitting in front of a
park. A boy holding a football helmet climbs into the minivan, followed by
his two younger sisters. “Introducing the all-new Enclave,” begins a woman’s
voice-over. Dad is behind the wheel and Mom is in the passenger seat. Cup
holders are everywhere. Dad starts the car and pulls away from the curb.
“It’s a minivan to the max.” The minivan cruises slowly
through suburban streets. “With features like remote-controlled sliding rear
doors, 150 cable channels, a full sky-view roof, temperature-controlled cup
holders, and the six-point navigation system . . . It’s the minivan for families on the
go.” The
Enclave pulls to a stop at an intersection. The camera zooms in on the boy,
gazing out a side window that reflects giant, leafy trees. Dad pulls into the
intersection. That’s when it happens. A speeding car barrels into
the intersection and broadsides the minivan. There is a terrifying collision,
with metal buckling and an explosion of broken glass. The screen fades to black,
and a message appears: “Didn’t see that coming?” The question fades and is
replaced by a statement: “No one ever does.” With the sound of a stuck
horn blaring in the background, a few final words flash across the screen:
“Buckle up. . . Always.” There is no Enclave
minivan. This ad was created by the Ad Council. (The Enclave spot was
sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation.) The Ad Council, founded
in 1942, has launched many successful campaigns, from the World War Il—era
“Loose Lips Sink Ships” to the more recent “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive
Drunk.” The Enclave ad, like many other Council ads, capitalizes on the
second characteristic of sticky ideas: Unexpectedness. The Enclave ad is
unexpected because it violates our schema for car commercials. We know how
car commercials are supposed to behave. Pickups climb mountains of boulders.
Sports cars zip along vacant curvy roads. SUVs carry yuppies through forests
to waterfalls. And minivans deliver kids to soccer practice. No one dies,
ever. The ad is unexpected in a
second way: It violates our schema of real-life neighborhood trips. We take
thousands of trips in our neighborhoods, and the vast majority of them end
safely. The commercial reminds us that accidents are inherently unexpected—we
ought to buckle up, just in case. Our schemas are like
guessing machines. Schemas help us predict what will happen and,
consequently, how we should make decisions. The Enclave asks, “Didn’t see
that coming?” No, we didn’t. Our guessing machines failed, which caused us to
be surprised. Emotions are elegantly
tuned to help us deal with critical situations. They prepare us for
different ways of acting and thinking. We’ve all heard that anger prepares us
to fight and fear prepares us to flee. The linkages between emotion and
behavior can be more subtle, though. For instance, a secondary effect of
being angry, which was recently discovered by researchers, is that we become
more certain of our judgments. When we’re angry, we know we’re right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can
attest. So if emotions have
biological purposes, then what is the biological purpose of surprise?
Surprise jolts us to attention. Surprise is triggered when our schemas fail,
and it prepares us to understand why the failure occurred. When our guessing
machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for
the future. The Surprise Brow Surprise is associated
with a facial expression that is consistent across cultures. In a book called
Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman and
Wallace Friesen coined a term, “the surprise brow,” to describe the distinctive
facial expression of surprise: “The eyebrows appear curved and high.. . . The
skin below the brow has been stretched by the lifting of the brow, and is
more visible than usual.” When our brows go up,
it widens our eyes and gives us a broader field of vision—the surprise brow
is our body’s way of forcing us to see more. We may also do a double take to
make sure that we saw what we thought we saw. By way of contrast, when we’re
angry our eyes narrow so that we can focus on a known problem. In addition to
making our eyebrows rise, surprise causes our jaws to drop and our mouths to
gape. We’re struck momentarily speechless. Our bodies temporarily stop moving
and our muscles go slack. It’s as though our bodies want to ensure that we’re
not talking or moving when we ought to be taking in new information. So surprise acts as a
kind of emergency override when we confront something unexpected and our
guessing machines fail. Things come to a halt, ongoing activities are
interrupted, our attention focuses involuntarily on the event that surprised
us. When a minivan commercial ends in a bloodcurdling crash, we stop and
wonder, What is going on? Unexpected ideas are
more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think. That
extra attention and thinking sears unexpected events into our memories.
Surprise gets our attention. Sometimes the attention is fleeting, but in
other cases surprise can lead to enduring attention. Surprise can prompt us
to hunt for underlying causes, to imagine other possibilities, to figure out
how to avoid surprises in the future. Researchers who study
conspiracy theories, for instance, have noted that many of them arise when
people are grappling with unexpected events, such as when the young and
attractive die suddenly. There are conspiracy theories about the sudden
deaths of JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and Kurt Cobain. There tends to be
less conspiratorial interest in the sudden deaths of ninety-year-olds. Surprise makes us want to
find an answer—to resolve the question of why we were surprised—and big
surprises call for big answers. If we want to motivate people to pay
attention, we should seize the power of big surprises. I didn’t expect to like Made to
Stick as much as I did. I found myself thinking about messages that I’ve
found memorable, and they all pass the Heath stickiness test. Just reading Made to
Stick will improve your ability to communicate. You can practice what
they offer and spend years improving your messages. Steve Hopkins,
February 23, 2007 |
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·
2007 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Made
to Stick.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park,
IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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