Sticky Communication

What makes an idea sticky? Why are urban legends a thought’s reach away while the arguably more important stuff escapes us so readily?

Take the worry over tampered Halloween candy as one example.

You hear about it every October in your local newscast’s feature on Halloween safety. In 1985, a poll taken by ABC found that 60 percent of parents in America worried their children would be victimized by tampered candy. The results prompted two sociologists to evaluate the veracity of this widespread fear and review every case in which a child was harmed during or immediately after Halloween.  They began with criminal reports dating back to 1958.

The result of their study? Not a single case found of a child hurt by tampered candy.

Somewhere someone had generated a rumor built on an idea so evocative and sticky that for millions of Americans it became a reality.

The story of sticky ideas like this and others is brought to us by brothers Chip & Dan Heath in “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” (Random House; $26.00). Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and teaches at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Dan Heath was most recently a Consultant to the Policy Programs of the Aspen Institute and has held research positions at the Harvard Business School.

“Made to Stick” extends the line of thought developed in Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal work “The Tipping Point.” Therein, Gladwell unearths the mystery of social epidemics and argues that ideas underpinning a social phenomenon need to be sticky before the phenomenon can tip and, for lack of a better term, go viral.

The Heath brothers claim that ideas are not born interesting but are instead made interesting. They cite the work of an Israeli research team that, in 1999, identified six advertising templates under which 89 percent of award-winning ads could be classified by an objective evaluation staff. The surprise here was that the most successful ads, the ones you or I would deem most creative and poignant, were in fact more predictable than the uncreative ones, and that creativity can to some degree be systemized and taught.

What the Israeli researchers did for ads “Made to Stick” does for ideas. According to the Heath brothers, sticky ideas share six common traits: a core that’s simple and establishes a strict priority for action, an element of surprise or unexpectedness, a concrete grounding that makes the abstract not so abstract, credibility in the sense that one example can cover limitless contingencies, elements of empathy that arouse emotion, and finally a story or narrative that ties it all together.

The authors’ mission is an ambitious one, and in fulfilling their aims they perform feats of academic alchemy, turning research studies into entertaining and applicable lessons on communication. This book alone has the power to change the way teachers teach, managers manage, and writers write.

The Heath brothers in their introduction identify a universal nemesis, the anti-matter of stickiness they dub the Curse of Knowledge. The Curse of Knowledge addresses the danger of knowing too much, specifically when experts spout jargon or discipline specific concepts to non-experts. This lies at the core of communication breakdown and strategic failure, the book argues, ensuring that the people who need the information most will be certain to never get it.

In response, what the book does is to establish common ground for the presentation of ideas by grounding them in the universal language provided in the six traits. Those in the highest levels of their profession fall in love with the abstract, and so when it’s time to convey ideas to the masses, experts have no clue how to make what’s infinitely interesting to them understandable and applicable to someone outside their field. Experts forget what it’s like to not know what they know.

This book is to communication and marketing what Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style” is to the English language.

It is, however, not without caveat. The title is somewhat misleading. Yes, we learn how ideas stick, but the ambition of the introduction never finds actualization in the thick of the book. Where, in Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” the surprises and wonder never really stop, nothing in this book is all that, well, unexpected. The Heath brothers appear to want to stay close to harbor just in case bad weather crops up, and so never take any chances with their research.

Moreover, the somewhat schlocky and now quotidian practice of including some banal business acronym places an artificial limit on the language used in the book. The authors even go so far to rebuke this imposition in the text itself, stating in so few words they had to follow the party line and include an acronym for the sake of the publishers.

The chance that business leaders – the default reader of “Made to Stick” – will use the outlined concepts to enact changes in their corporate environment is quite the lofty goal, and perhaps one that should have taken a back seat to the students, academics, writers, politicians, and analysts who will no doubt have more ready applicability for these concepts. If anything, “Made to Stick” limits itself by aiming for the sky with an audience that may or may not care.

Had this book taken less of a business-intensive approach we would have seen the Heath brothers flex more of their literary muscle. As it is, the writing teeters on the mundane, the examples terse and to the point but lacking in nuance. Great for a plug-and-play business book, not so great for those seeking an in-depth exploration of the topics at hand.

Despite these reservations I can’t recommend this book enough. The book addresses the tried and true concepts of communication but presents them in a way that makes them easy to grasp and apply. A wonderful tome deserving of a place on your bookshelf, regardless of what your career aspirations may be. Best of luck in all your future sticky endeavors.

Tagged as: business, marketing, social psychology