Denver Peak Academy

In the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, there are six principles presented to help you craft and effectively present ideas that will stick in the minds of your intended audience.

According to the Heath Brothers, “every idea can be presented so that it sticks. Successful stories, advertising campaigns and ideas that stick generally share recognizable characteristics that can be summed up in the mnemonic SUCCESs.”

The mnemonic SUCCESs is presented through a series of case studies and examples that highlight the empirical value of presenting a Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, and Emotional Story – the “Six Principles of Sticky Ideas”. When used successfully, the Six Principles of Sticky Ideas “can genetically engineer our players [ideas]” into powerhouses capable of making the points you’ll need to win your audience and inspire action.

Despite your genes and lack of “natural creativity,” the following powerful principles will exemplify to you how moderate “focused effort can make almost any idea stickier, and a sticky idea is an idea that is more likely to make a difference.”

“All you need to do is understand the six principles of powerful ideas.”

Six Principles of Sticky Ideas

Principle 1: Simplicity

“How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.” (p. 17)

Principle 2: Unexpectedness

“How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise—an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus—to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep students engaged during the forty-eighth history class of the year? We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.” (p. 17)

Principle 3: Concreteness

“How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.” (p. 17)

Principle 4: Credibility

“How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don’t enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.” (p. 17)

Principle 5 – Emotions:

“How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic “37 grams” doesn’t elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.” (p.17)

Principle 6 – Stories:

“How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.” (p. 17)

The Heath Brothers believe that “if you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time.” SUCCESs outlines those principles and it’s simple. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Don’t think of the principles as restrictive or a foolproof recipe. Simply leverage the principles to help you and your team start creating ideas that are fundamentally structured to stick semi-permanently into the hearts and minds of your audience. Inspire your audience to action and reach the core of your market.