Do you ever have the impression that no one takes your ideas seriously? Why is it so difficult to get our great ideas across while urban legends and conspiracy theories circulate so effortlessly?
It turns out these ideas and stories — the ones that spread like wildfire — all share some identical common principles. That means we can learn and apply these principles to make our own ideas more appealing and successful.
In this posting, Litemind reader Johan Dhaeseleer shares with us a mind map summary of the 2007 bestseller Made to Stick. The book presents the common traits of successful ideas, turning them into a simple formula we can use to make our own ideas stick.
From Great Ideas to Sticky Ideas
What’s the story with ’sticky ideas’? According to the authors, Chip and Dan Heath, it means that “your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact — they change your audience’s opinions or behavior”.
If you want people to do something — to actually use — your ideas, it doesn’t matter how great those ideas are: if you can’t get them across effectively, nobody will care about them. As obvious as it is, this is an error creative people make all the time: we care too much about developing our ideas and too little about communicating them effectively.
A Checklist for Successful Ideas
By analyzing numerous case studies, Chip and Dan show us the underlying principles that lead to ’sticky’ ideas, noting that the more these principles are expressed in an idea, the more likely it is to become successful.
The formula is conveniently summarized by the acronym SUCCES, meaning:
- Simple: What’s the essential core of the idea?
- Unexpected: Does the idea grab people’s attention?
- Concrete: Is the idea clear? Isn’t it abstract?
- Credible: Will people believe the idea?
- Emotion: Will people care about the idea?
- Story: Does the idea inspire people? Will they act on it?
A Quick Example
To understand how the formula works, let’s take a look at one of the case studies in the book: You do know Jared, the 425-pound fast-food dieter, don’t you?
If you live in the US you certainly know about him. For those who don’t, Jared is the central character in one of the most successful ad campaigns of the decade, created for fast-food chain Subway. The ad campaign is about how Jared shed almost 100 pounds (45 kg) in just 3 months by eating mostly at Subway. (You can check the original ad here).
So, how did the ‘Jared’ ad campaign become so immensely successful? Here’s how it fits in Made to Stick’s SUCCES formula:
- Simple: Eat sandwiches and lose weight.
- Unexpected: A guy lost a lot of weight by eating fast food!
- Concrete: He shows his oversized pants, mentions specific sandwiches.
- Credible: We can see how a guy who used to wear 60-inch pants and XXXXXXL shirts is now slender.
- Emotional: We care more about an individual — Jared — than about a faceless person in a crowd.
- Story: The protagonist overcomes big odds to triumph. He inspires the rest of us to do the same.
If you think about this formula, you’ll see that you can use it to make just about any idea more appealing.
Book Summary
Find below the summary of Made to Stick in mind map format.
The mind map is courtesy of Litemind reader Johan DHaeseleer, and is Johan’s second contribution to our growing gallery. (Make sure you check his previous mind map on Brain Rules — another truly amazing book.)
Get the mind map for Made to Stick:
A Short Digression on Mind Map Formats: Introducing XMind
A while ago, another amazing Litemind reader, Bruno Unna (round of applause, please), recommended the XMind mind mapping application. After playing with it for a while, I was impressed.
XMind is free, open-source, multi-platform, portable and much easier to use than Freemind (not to mention that the resulting mind maps are much more elegant!)
Although my primary mind mapping application of choice continues to be MindManager, XMind now comes as a close second.
I always like to offer open, platform-independent mind maps to readers — that’s why I’ve been including mind maps in Freemind format. If I don’t find any showstoppers, I’ll share them using XMind from now on.
Conclusion
What I enjoy the most about Made to Stick is that Chip and Dan practice what they preach: the book is packed with great stories and examples, so it’s not only very informative but a great and fun read.
That’s probably why it became a successful, ’sticky’ hit, and has been on many “must read” book lists (like in Jack Covert’s compilation 100 most influential books of all time and many others).
If you’re interested in Made to Stick, you can get more information in the official website or buy it directly from Amazon.com.
I have not read Made to Stick but here is what I think about what ideas actually survive. Our brain continuously keeps rationalizing between extreme signals of psychology. And that extreme is what really counts. And an algorithm of YES and NO is formed. The incredible things is that we think good things as Yes and Bad things as No. So, only those ideas survive which pass with either the intense positive power or the intense opposition for positive power.
I’m not sure I follow your reasoning, Jaky. Are you saying that in order for an idea to be memorable, it has to be strongly emotionally-charged (either positively or negatively)?
As I have been studying my mind since years too, I have found that mind operates in a particular frequency. Even if you repeat an idea a 1000 times in your mind, it won’t reach you subconscious except it is transmitted through that exact frequency.
And what I mean to say with that algorithm thing is that our brains are naturally programmed to understand yes as positive, just like in algorithms. If yes do this, if no, return to last step. Brain works like that. So,ultimately, brain keeps searching for the most yes and positive emotions on it’s own.
Know what, I have been using the perfect frequency of brain to get green traffic signals every time I reach the signals, and brain does it so precisely that it feels like magic.
The idea survives because of its continuous yes yes algorithmic order. When you understand that something is happening in some particular way, that idea will become a belief and that’s how it will survive. Ideas survive in the form of beliefs.
Thanks for the clarification, Jaky.
After reading your explanation, one first thing came to my mind: a technique that’s used a lot in sales. It consists of making the prospect say ‘yes’ as many times as possible in order to smoothly progress to the final ‘yes’ (the one that closes the sale).
This seems to be strictly related to the phenomenon you describe.
Love that book! Great post on it!
I am so glad to see this post — and have this mindmap. As a matter of fact, this is one of the greatest books on marketing (and memetics, after all) I’ve ever read.
And quite a metabook — if you notice how they use credible, emotional stories, simple acronyms and the like to make itself memorable.
I recently read this book and it was outstanding. Thank you for sharing the mind map of it – I will refer to this a lot!
As usual, great content on Litemind.
Luciano, the part I like about the article is the bulleted list of the acronym SUCCES. It communicates in a nutshell the essence of the article. And communication IS the essence of your article. This is another story to peruse and put into practice. Thanks again.
Luciano,
“Made to Stick” is an excellent book. Thanks for the article, which will give people who have not yet read it a good sense of what to expect.
Coincidentally, I am in the middle of a series of articles on making speeches and presentations stick based on the book. Dan Heath even commented on one of them. For each of the Heaths stickiness factors I have a separate post and then a video of a speech that I think demonstrates the point.
I hope that you and your readers find them useful.
Cheers!
John Zimmer
http://mannerofspeaking.wordpress.com/
Wow John, that’s a terrific series of posts!
I recommend everyone interested in applying the concepts in Made to Stick in presentations to visit John’s series of posts, good stuff there. Thanks for sharing, John!
Luciano,
Mille grazie per le tue parole. (Ho studiato l’italiano quand’ero nel liceo e dovrei usarlo quando posso!)
I am glad that you like the series. Part 5 has just been posted.
Cheers!
John
http://mannerofspeaking.wordpress.com/
Jared was a genius ad campaign i only wish that i had been in on that. I think that in this day and age one of your most valuable assets is the ability to come up with IDEAS
I wrote yesterday on your facebook profile about how I thought this sounded quite a bit like the tipping point. In my mind this is also a very useful book for bloggers because it can help us drive the development of our content.
Hi Srinivas,
Yes, “SUCCES” is a terrific checklist (and framework) for everyone who needs to communicate ideas, and that of course includes us bloggers. My goas is to consciously apply it in future posts… let’s see how the blog improves as a result.
I really enjoyed the summary! As a magician I try to make sure my tricks are Simple (no complicated math tricks and counting piles of cards), Unexpected, Concrete (that hat was certainly empty)Credible (there’s no way he could have cheated)Emotion (just tricking the audience is a puzzle – the goal is the amaze and enchant) Story (done correctly a simple trick will become a miracle as the story is retold and the trick is misremembered)
I’m a fan of LiteMind. Keep it up!
Thanks for bringing up an unexpected application of the SUCCESS formula! (I love to see how it applies to just about every form of communication.)
I always enjoyed magic tricks and indeed — now that you pointed out — those characteristics are exactly what make a trick really stand out from the rest…
Thanks for the fresh perspective, Brian!
I have to agree about XMind. I toyed with a number of mind mapping software but XMind just fit better than the rest. Plus, it’s open-source and free – who doesn’t like free?
Paul
Although it also has its problems, XMind is by far the best free mind mapping application I’ve found to date. I am very curious about its future development: if it continues to steadily evolve, it will soon easily beat most of today’s commercial applications.
Hi there,
I haven’t read the book “Made to Stick” but your discussion about how great ideas turn into sticky ideas is right on the dot. I love your explanation about the SUCCES formula and I agree that ideas should have it so it would appeal to more people.
What do you think about the idea of “Make More, Live More, Give More?” I recently came across this blog (http://makemorelivemoregivemore.com) and would like to know if you think it’s a “sticky idea.”
Thanks for sharing this wonderful piece.
Nikka
Luciano, what do you think about the relationship between sticking ideas and memes?
According to my dictionary:
meme. (n): cultural idea, social practice, concept or action that becomes a norm and begins to repeat itself consciously in a society. (term coined by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene”, 1976)
That sounds pretty sticky to me! I believe memes are sticky ideas by definition, but with an even stronger viral component. That makes the idea self-reinforcing and, as a result, even stickier.
I love the book “The Selfish Gene”, by the way.
Coincidentally, I just started re-reading the book and the mind map would be very helpful.
Thanks, Luciano!
Alain
Luchiano
Excellent post. Thank you for taking the time to write it. I’m going to order it today.
Another good book on this subject is How the Brain Learns by David Sousa. He wrote it for school teachers, but the first part discussed how and why we remember what we do. He talks in layman’s terms but uses recent brain research to support his opinions.
BTW, you have a very cool site. I’ll come back often.
– Bob
Thanks for the recommendation, Bob. I haven’t heard about that book before and just added it to my Amazon queue.
Glad you enjoyed the site!
This is a great book! I tend to like books that have this “tipping point” type theme. Thanks for posting!
Hey. You got some valid points here. Sounds like an easy and simple book to read. Good post.
+Baker