make short synopsis of the reading (CP9) and a relevant question you still have about the topic after doing the reading.

INl'Ronucl'loN WHAT STICKS? friend ofa friend of ours is a frequent business traveler. Let's Acall him Dave. Dave was recently in Atlantic City for an im- portant meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his ight, so he went to a local bar for a drink. He'd just nished one drink when an attractive woman ap- proached and asked if she could buy him another. He was surprised but attered. Sure, he said. The woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinksone for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remem- bered. Rather, that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up, disoriented, lying in a hotel bathtub, his body submerged in ice He looked around frantically, trying to gure out where he was and how he got there Then he spotted the note: DON'T MOVE. CALL 911. A cell phone rested on a small table beside the bathtub. He picked it up and called 911, his ngers numb and clumsy from the ice. The operator seemed oddly familiar with his situation. She said, \"Sir, I want you to reach behind you, slowly and carefully. Is there a tube protruding from your lower back?" MADE TO STICK Anxious, he felt around behind him. Sure enough, there was a tube. The operator said, \"Sir, don't panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested. There's a ring of organ thieves operating in this city, and they got to you. Paramedics are on their way. Don't move until they arrive.\" You've just read one of the most successful urban legends of the past fteen years, The rst clue is the classic urban-legend open- ing: \"A friend ofa friend . . ." Have you ever noticed that our friends' friends have much more interesting lives than our friends them- selves? You've probably heard the Kidney Heist tale before. There are hundreds of versions in circulation, and all of them share a core of three elements: (1) the drugged drink, (2) the ice-lled bathtub, and (3) the kidney-theft punch line. One version features a married man who receives the drugged drink from a prostitute he has invited to his room in Las Vegas, It's a morality play with kidneys. Imagine that you closed the book right now, took an hourlong break, then Called a friend and told the story, without rereading it. Chances are you could tell it almost perfectly. You might forget that the traveler was in Atlantic City for \"an important meeting with clients"who cares about that? But you'd remember all the impor- tant stuff The Kidney Heist is a story that sticks. We understand it, we re- member it, and we can retell it later. And if we believe it's tme, it might change our behavior permanentlyiat least in terms ofaccept- ing drinks from attractive strangers. Contrast the Kidney Heist story with this passage, drawn from a paper distributed by a nonprot organization. \"Comprehensive coin- munity building naturally lends itself to a retum-on-investment ra- INTRODUCTION tionale that can be modeled, drawing on existing practice," it begins, going on to argue that \"[a] factor constraining the flow of resources to CCls is that funders must often resort to targeting or categorical re- quirements in grant making to ensure accountability." Imagine that you closed the book right now and took an hourlong break. In fact, don't even take a break; just call up a friend and retell that passage without rereading it. Good hick. Is this a fair comparisonan urban legend to a cherry-picked bad passage? Ofcourse not. But here's where things get interesting: Think of our two examples as two poles on a spectrum of memorability. Which sounds closer to the communications you encounter at work.7 If you're like most people, your workplace gravitates toward the non- prot polc as though it wcrc thc North Star. Maybe this is perfectly natural; some ideas are inherently interesting and some are inherently uninteresting. A gang of organ thieves inher- ently interesting! Nonprot nancial strategyginherently uninterest- ing! It's the nature versus nurture debate applied to ideas: Are ideas born interesting or made interesting? Well, this is a nurture book. So how do we nurture our ideas so they'll succeed in the world? Many of us struggle with how to communicate ideas effectively, how to get our ideas to make a difference. A biology teacher spends an hour explaining mitosis, and a week later only three kids remember what it is. A manager makes a speech unveiling a new strategy as the staffers nod their heads enthusiastically, and the next day the front- line employees are observed cheerfully implementing the old one. Good ideas often have a hard time succeeding in the world. Yet the ridiculous Kidney Heist tale keeps circulating, with no resources whatsoever to support it. Why? Is it simply because hijacked kidneys sell better than other topics.7 Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as ef- fectively as this false idea? MADE TO STICK The Truth About Movie Popcorn Art Silverman stared at a bag ofmovie popcorn. It looked out of place sitting on his desk His ofce had long since lled up with fake-butter fumes. Silverman knew, because of his organization's research, that the popcorn on his desk was unhealthy. shockingly unhealthy, in fact. His job was to gure out a way to communicate this message to the unsuspecting moviegoers of America. Silverman worked for the Center for Science in the Public Inter- est (CSPI), a nonprot grollp that educates the public about nutri- tion. The CSPI sent bags of movie popcorn from a dozen theaters in three major cities to a lab for nutritional analysis. The results sur- priscd cvcryonci The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recom- mends that a normal diet contain no more than 20 grams ofsaturated fat each day, According to the lab results, the typical bag ofpopcorn had 37 grams. The culprit was coconut oil, which theaters used to pop their pop- corn. Coconut oil had some big advantages over other oils It gave the popcorn a nice, silky texture, and released a more pleasant and natu- ral aroma than the alternative oils. Unfortunately, as the lab results showed, coconut oil was also brimming with saturated fat. The single sewing of popcorn on Silverman's deska snack someone might scarf down between mealshad nearly two days' worth of saturated fat. And those 37 grams of saturated fat were packed into a medium-sized serving of popcorn. No doubt a decent- sized bucket could have cleared triple digits. The challenge, Silverman realized, was that few people know what \"37 grams of saturated fat" means. Most of us don't memorize the USDA's daily nutrition recommendations. Is 37 grams good or bad? And even if we have an intuition that it's bad, we'd wonder ifit was \"bad bad" (like cigarettes) or \"normal bad" (like a cookie or a milk shake). INTRODUCTION Even the phrase \"37 grams ofsaturated fat" by itselfwas enough to cause most people's eyes to glaze over. \"Saturated fat has zero ap- peal," Silverman says. \"It's dry, its academic, who cares?" Silverman could have created some kind of visual comparison perhaps an advertisement comparing the amount of saturated fat in the popcorn with the USDA's reconnnended daily allowance. Think of a bar graph, with one of the bars stretching twice as high as the other. But that was too scientic somehow. Too rational The amount of fat in this popcorn was, in some sense, not rational It was ludicrous. The CSPI needed a way to shape the message in a way that fully com- municated this ludicrousness. Silvcrman came up with a solution. SPl called a press conference on September 27, 1992. Here's the message it presented: \"A medium-sized 'butter' popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and~eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries forlunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmingscombined!" The folks at CSPI didn't neglect the visualsthey laid out the full buffet ofgreasy food for the television cameras. An entire day's worth of unhealthy eating, displayed on a table. All that saturated fat stuffed into a single bag of popcorn. The story was an immediate sensation, featured on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN. It made the front pages of USA Today, the Las An- geles Times, and The Washington Post's Style section. Leno and Let- terman cracked jokes about fat-soaked popcorn, and headline writers trotted out some doozies: \"Popcorn Gets an 'R' Rating," \"Lights, Ac- tion, Cholesterol!\" \"Theater Popcorn is Double Feature of Fat." The idea stucki Moviegoers, repulsed by these ndings, avoided popcorn in droves. Sales plunged. The service staff at movie houses grew accustomed to elding questions about whether the popcorn Page 6 of 23 MADE TO STICK was popped in the \"bad" oil. Soon after, most of the nation's big- gest theater chainsincluding United Artists, AMC, and Loews announced that they would stop using coconut oil. 0n Stickiness This is an idea success story. Even better, it's a truthful idea success story. The people at CSPI knew something about the world that they needed to share. They gured out a way to communicate the idea so that people would listen and care. And the idea stuckjust like the Kidney Heist tale. And, let's be honest, the odds were stacked against the CSPI. The \"movie popcorn is fatty" story lacks the lurid appeal of an organ- thieving gang. No one woke up in an oil-filled bathtub. The story wasn't sensational, and it wasn't even particularly entertaining. Fur- thermore, there was no natural constituency for the newsifew of us make an effort to \"stay up to date with popcorn news.\" There were no celebrities, models, or adorable pets involved. In short, the popcorn idea was a lot like the ideas that most of us trafc in every dayideas that are interesting but not sensational, truthful but not mind-blowing, important but not \"life-ordeath." Un- less you're in advertising or public relations, you probably don't have many resources to back your ideas. You don't have a multimillion- dollar ad budget or a team of professional spinners. Your ideas need to stand on their own merits. We wrote this book to help you make your ideas stick. By \"stick," we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact7 they change your audience's opinions or behavior. At this point, it's worth asking why you'd need to make your ideas stick. After all, the vast majority of our daily communication doesn't require stickiness. \"Pass the gravy\" doesn't have to be memorable. When we tell our friends about our relationship problems, we're not trying to have a \"lasting impact." INTRODUCTION So not every idea is stick-worthy. When we ask people how often they need to make an idea stick, they tell us that the need arises be- tween once a month and once a week, twelve to fty-two times per year. For managers, these are \"big ideas" about new strategic direc- tions and guidelines for behavior. Teachers try to convey themes and conicts and trends to their studentsthe kinds of themes and ways of thinking that will endure long after the individual factoids have faded. Columnists try to change readers' opinions on policy issues. Religious leaders try to share spiritual wisdom with their congregants. Nonprot organizations try to persuade volunteers to contribute their time and donors to contribute their money to a worthy cause. Given the importance of making ideas stick, it's surprising how little attention is paid to the subject. When we gct advice on commu- nicating, it often concerns our delivery: \"Stand up straight, make eye contact, use appropriate hand gestures. Practice, practice, practice (but don't sound eanned)." Sometimes we get advice about structure: \"Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em. Tell 'em, then tell 'em what you told 'em." Or \"Start by getting their attentiontell a joke or a story.\" Another genre concerns knowing your audience: \"Know what your listeners care about, so you can tailor your communication to them." And, nally, there's the most common refrain in the realm of communication advice: Use repetition, repetition, repetition. All of this advice has obvious merit, except, perhaps, for the em- phasis on repetition. (If you have to tell someone the same thing ten times, the idea probably wasn't very well designed. No urban legend has to be repeated ten times.) But this set of advice has one glaring shortcoming: It doesn't help Art Silverman as he tries to gure out the best way to explain that movie popcorn is really unhealthful. Silverman no doubt knows that he should make eye contact and practice. But what message is he supposed to practice? He knows his audiencethey're people who like popcorn and don't realize how unhealthy it is. So what message does he share with them? Compli- Page 8 of 23 10 MADE TO STICK cating matters, Silverman knew that he wouldn't have the luxury of repetitionhe had only one shot to make the media care about his story. Or think about an elementary-school teacher. She knows her goal: to teach the material mandated by the state curriculum com- mittee. She knows her audience: third graders with a range of knowl- edge and skills. She knows how to speak effectivelyshe's a virtuoso ofposture and diction and eye contact. So the goal is clear, the audi- ence is clear, and the format is clear. But the design of the message itself is far from clear, The biology students need to understand mito sisokay, now what? There are an innite number of ways to teach mitosis. Which way will stick? And how do you know in advance? What Led to Made to Stick The broad question, then, is how do you design an idea that sticks? A few years ago the two of [Isbrothers Chip and Danrealized that both of us had been studying how ideas stick for about ten years. Our expertise came from very different elds, but we had zeroed in on the same question: Why do some ideas succeed while others fail? Dan had developed a passion for education. He cofounded a start-up publishing company called Thinkwell that asked a somewhat heretical question: If you were going to build a textbook from scratch, using video and technology instead of text, how would you do it? As the editor in chief ofThinkwell, Dan had to work with his team to de- termine the best ways to teach subjects like economics, biology, cal- culus, and physics. He had an opportunity to work with some of the most effective and best-loved professors in the country: the calculus teacher who was also a standup comic; the biology teacher who was named national Teacher of the Year; the economics teacher who was also a chaplain and a playwright. Essentially, Dan enjoyed a crash course in what makes great teachers great. And he found that, while INTRODUCTION 11 each teacher had a unique style, collectively their instructional methodologies were almost identical. Chip, as a professor at Stanford University, had spent about ten years asking why bad ideas sometimes won out in the social market- place of ideas. How could a false idea displace a true one? And what made some ideas more viral than others? As an entry point into these topics, he dove into the realm of "naturally sticky" ideas such as urban legends and conspiracy theories. Over the years, he's become uncomfortably familiar with some of the most repulsive and absurd tales in the annals of ideas. He's heard them all. Here's a Very small sampler: ' Thc Kcntucky Fricd Rat. Really, any talc that involves rats and fast food is on fertile ground. Coca-Cola rots your bones. This fear is big in Japan, but so far the country hasn't experienced an epidemic of gelati- nous teenagers. If you ash your brights at a car whose headlights are off, you will be shot by a gang member. The Great Wall ofChina is the only manmade object that is visible from space. (The Wall is really long but not very wide. Think about it: If the Wall were visible, then airy in- terstate highway would also be visible, and maybe a few Wal-Mart superstores as well.) ' You Lise only 10 percent of your brain. (If this were true, it would certainly make brain damage a lot less worrisome.) Chip, along with his students, has spent hundreds of hours col- lecting, coding, and analyzing naturally sticky ideas: urban legends, wartime rumors, proverbs, conspiracy theories, and jokes. Urban leg- ends are false, but many naturally sticky ideas are true. In fact, per- haps the oldest class of naturally sticky ideas is the proverba nugget Page 10 of 23 12 MADE TO STICK of wisdom that often endures over centuries and across cultures. As an example, versions of the proverb \"Where there's smoke there's re\" have appeared in more than fty-ve different languages. In studying naturally sticky ideas, both trivial and profound, Chip has conducted more than forty experiments with more than 1,700 participants on topics such as: ' Why Nostradamus's prophecies are still read after 400 years ' Why Chicken Sou]: for the Soul stories are inspirational 0 Why ineffective folk remedies persist A few years ago, he started teaching a course at Stanford called \"How to Makc ldcas Stick.\" The premise ofthc coursc was that if we understood what made ideas naturally sticky we might be better at making our own messages stick. During the past few years he has taught this topic to a few hundred students bound for careers as managers, public-policy analysts, journalists, designers, and lm di- rectors. To complete the story of the Brothers Heath, in 2004 it dawned on us that we had been approaching the same problem from different angles. Chip had researched and taught what made ideas stick. Dan had tried to gure out pragmatic ways to make ideas stick. Chip had compared the success of different urban legends and stories. Dan had compared the success of different math and government lessons. Chip was the researcher and the teacher. Dan was the practitioner and the writer. (And we knew that we could make our parents happy by spending more quality time together.) We wanted to take apart sticky ideasiboth natural and created7 and gure out what made them stick. What makes urban legends so compelling? Why do some chemistry lessons work better than others? Why does virtually every society circulate a set of proverbs? Why do some political ideas circulate widely while others fall short? In short, we were looking to understand what sticks.We adopted INTRODUCTION 13 the \"what sticks" terminology from one of our favorite authors, Mal- colm Gladwell. In 2000, Gladwell wrote a brilliant book called The Tipping Point, which examined the forces that cause social phenom- ena to \"tip," or make the leap from small groups to big groups, the way contagious diseases spread rapidly once they infect a certain crit- ical mass of people. Why did Hush Puppies experience a rebirth? Why did crime rates abruptly plummet in New York City? Why did the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood catch on? The Tipping Point has three sections The rst addresses the need to get the right people, and the third addresses the need for the right context. The middle section of the book, \"The Stickiness Factor," ar- gues that innovations are more likely to tip when they're sticky. When The Tipping Point was published, Chip realized that \"stickiness" was the perfect word for the attribute that he was chasing with his re- search into the marketplace of ideas This book is a complement to The Tipping Point in the sense that we will identify the traits that make ideas sticky, a subject that was be- yond the scope of Cladwell's book. Cladwell was interested in what makes social epidemics epidemic. Our interest is in how effective ideas are constructedwhat makes some ideas stick and others dis- appear. So, while our focus will veer away from The Tipping Point's turf, we want to pay tribute to Cladwell for the word \"stickiness." It stuck. Who Spoiled Halloween? In the 1960s and l970s, the tradition of Halloween trick-ortreating came under attack. Rumors circulated about Halloween sadists who put razor blades in apples and booby-trapped pieces of candy. The ru- mors affected the Halloween tradition nationwide. Parents carefully examined their children's candy bags. Schools opened their doors at night so that kids could trick-or-treat in a safe environment, Hospitals volunteered to Xray candy bags. MADE TO STICK In I985, an ABC News poll showed that 60 percent of parents worried that their children might be victimized. To this day, many parents warn their children not to eat any snacks that aren't prepack- agedr This is a sad story: a family holiday sullied by bad people who, inexplicably, wish to harm children. But in 1985 the story took a strange twist. Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth. The researchers, sociologists Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, stud- ied every reported Halloween incident since 1958 They found no in- stances where strangers caused children life-threatening harm on Halloween by tampering with their candy. Two children did die on Halloween, but their deaths weren't eauscd by strangers A vc-ycar-old boy found his unclc's heroin stash and overdosed. His relatives initially tried to cover their tracks by sprinkling heroin on his candy. In another case, a father, hoping to collect on an insurance settlement, caused the death ofhis own son by contaminating his candy with cyanide. In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It's your family you should worry about. The candy-tampering story has changed the behavior of millions ofparents over the past thirty years. Sadly, it has made neighbors sus- picious of neighbors. It has even changed the laws of this country: Both California and New Jersey passed laws that carry special penal- ties for eandy-tamperers. Why was this idea so successful? Six Principles of Sticky Ideas The Halloween-candy story is, in a sense, the evil twin of the CSPI story. Both stories highlighted an unexpected danger in a common ac- tivity: eating Halloween candy and eating movie popcorn. Both sto- INTRODUCTION 15 ries called for simple action: examining your child's candy and avoid- ing movie popcorn. Both made use of vivid, concrete images that cling easily to memory: an apple with a buried razor blade and a table full ofgreasy foodsr And both stories tapped into emotion: fear in the case of Halloween candy and disgust in the case of movie popcorn. The Kidney Heist, too, shares many of these traits. A highly unex- pected outcome: a guy who stops for a drink and ends up one kidney short of a pair. A lot of concrete details: the ice-filled bathtub, the weird tube protruding from the lower back. Emotion: fear, disgust, suspicion. We began to see the same themes, the same attributes, reflected in a wide range ofsuccessful ideas. What we found based on Chip's researchiand by reviewing the research of dozens of folklorists, psy- chologists, educational researchers, political scientists, and proverb- hunterswas that sticky ideas shared certain key traits. There is no \"formula" for a sticky ideawe don't want to overstate the case. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed. It's like discussing the attributes of a great basketball player. You can be pretty sure that any great player has some subset of traits like height, speed, agility, power, and court sense. But you don't need all ofthese traits in order to be great: Some great guards are ve feet ten and scrawny. And having all the traits doesn't guarantee greatness: No doubt there are plenty of slow, clumsy seven-footers. It's Clear, though, that ifyou're on the neighborhood court, choosing your team from among strangers, you should probably take a gamble on the seven-foot dude. Ideas work in much the same way. One skill we can learn is the ability to spot ideas that have \"natural talent," like the sevenfoot strangers Later in the book, we'll discuss Subway's advertising carn- paign that focused on Iared, an obese college student who lost more than 200 pounds by eating Subway sandwiches every day. The cam- ge 14 of 23 16 MADE TO STICK paign was a huge success. And it wasn't created by a Madison Avenue advertising agency; it started with a single store owner who had the good sense to spot an amazing story. But here's where our basketball analogy breaks down: In the world of ideas, we can genetically engineer our players. We can create ideas with an eye to maximizing their stickiness. As we pored over hundreds of sticky ideas, we saw, over and over, the same six principles at work. PRINCIPLE I: SIMPLICITY How do we nd 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 mis- sionsound 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 pro- found that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it. 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 counterintu- itive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whale day's worth offatt'y foods! We can use surprisean emotion whose function is to in- crease alertness and cause focusto grab people's attention. But sur- prise 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 knowl- edge and then ll ing those gaps. INTRODUCTION 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 state- ments, synergies, strategies, visionsthey are often ambiguous to the point ofbeing meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of con- crete imagesice-lled bathtubs, apples with razorsbecause 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 en- sure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audi- ence. PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former sur- geon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-today 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 themselvesa \"try before you buy" philosophy for the world of ideas. When we're trying to build a case for something, most of us in- stinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole US. presidential debate in 1980 be- tween Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the econ- omy. 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.\" PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS How do we get people to care about our ideas.7 We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel dis- ge16 of 23 18 MADE TO STICK gusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic \"37 grams" doesn't elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a char- itable 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 nding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it's difcult 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 ofthe duplicity ofBig Tobacco. PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Fireghters naturally swap stories after every re, and by doing so they multiply thcir cxpcricncc; after years of hcaring stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might con- front during a re 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 ight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively. hose are the six principles of successful ideas. To summarize, here's our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Un- expected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronan SUCCESS. This is sheer coincidence, of course. (Okay, we admit, SUCCESS is a little comy. We could have changed \"Simple" to \"Core" and reordered a few letters. But, you have to admit, CCUCES is less memorable.) No special expertise is needed to apply these principles. There are no licensed stickologists. Moreover, many of the principles have a commonsense ring to them: Didn't most of us already have the intu- INTRODUCTION 21 This book will teach you how to transform your ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The six principles presented earlier are your best weapons. They can be used as a kind of checklist. Let's take the CEO who announces to her staff that they must strive to \"maximize shareholder value." Is this idea simple? Yes, in the sense that it's short, but it lacks the useful simplicity ofa proverb. ls it unexpected? No. Concrete? Not at all. Credible? Only in the sense that it's coming from the mouth of the CEO. Emotional? Um, no. A story? No. Contrast the \"maximize shareholder value" idea with John F. Ken- nedy's famous 1961 call to \"put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade." Simple? Yes. Unexpected? Yes. Con- crctc.7 Amazingly so. Crcdiblc.7 The goal sccmcd likc scicncc ction, but the source was credible. Emotional? Yes. Story? In miniature. Had John F. Kennedy been a CEO, he would have said, \"Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically tar- geted aerospace initiatives." Fortunately, JFK was more intuitive than a modern-day CEO; he knew that opaque, abstract missions don't captivate and inspire people. The moon mission was a classic case of a communicators dodging the Curse of Knowledge. It was a brilliant and beautiful ideaa single idea that motivated the actions of mil- lions ofpeople for a decade. Systematic Creativity Picture in your mind the type of person who's great at coming up with ideas. Have a mental image of the person? A lot of people, when asked to do this, describe a familiar stereotypethe \"creative genius," the kind of person who thinks up slogans in a hot advertising agency. Maybe, like us, you picture someone with gelled hair and hip cloth- ing, carrying a dog-eared notebook full of ironies and epiphanies, ready to drop everything and launch a four-hour brainstorming ses- Page 20 of 23 22 MADE TO STICK sion in a room full of caffeine and Whiteboards. Or maybe your stereotype isn't quite so elaborate. There's no question that some people are more creative than others, Perhaps they're just born that way. So maybe you'll never be the Michael Jordan ofsticky ideas. But the premise ofthis book is that creating sticky ideas is something that can be learned. In 1999, an Israeli research team assembled a group of 200 highly regarded adsads that were finalists and award winners in the top advertising competitions. They found that 89 percent of the awardwinning ads could be classied into six basic categories, or templates. That's remarkable. We might expect great creative con- cepts to be highly idiosyncraticemerging from the whims of born crcativc types It turns out that six simplc tcmplatcs go a long way. Most of these templates relate to the principle of unexpectedness. For example, the Extreme Consequences template points out unex- pected consequences of a product attribute, One ad emphasizes the power of a car stereo systemwhen the stereo belts out a tune, a bridge starts oscillating to the music, and when the speakers are cranked up the bridge shimmies so hard that it nearly collapses. This same template also describes the famous World War II slogan, cre- ated by the Ad Council, a nonprot organization that creates public- service campaigns for other nonprots and government agencies: Loose Lips Sink Ships." And speaking of extreme consequences, let's not forget the eggs sizzling in the 1980s commercial \"This is your brain on drugs" (also designed by the Ad Council). The template also pops up spontaneously in naturally sticky ideasfor example, the legend that Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. (For the other templates, see the endnotes.) The researchers also tried to use their six templates to classify 200 other adsfrom the same publications and for the same types of productsthat had not received awards. Amazingly, when the re- searchers tried to classify these \"less successful" ads, they could clas- sify only 2 percent of them