Remember Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of stickiness in The Tipping Point? Where Malcolm leaves off, Dan Heath picks up in his new book, Made to Stick. Part guidebook for inspiration, part fascinating insight into the culture of ideas, Made to Stick immediately became one of my favorites. And this week, co-author Dan shares his sticky insight in my Naked Career podcast.
Dan, a Harvard MBA and his brother Chip, a Stanford University professor, developed a formula for making ideas stickier. In an admittedly-cheesy-but-nevertheless-sticky acronym, they describe their formula for SUCCESs:

• Simplicity
• Unexpectedness
• Concreteness
• Credibility
• Emotional
• Stories

In his book Hey Whipple, Squeeze this, Luke Sullivan made fun of Thoreau with his Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity …brilliantly observing that the last two were redundant. Dan suggests that in our business communications, we’re all so tempted to fall into the trap of using abstractions everywhere, shareholder value, growth through innovation, six-sigma and those sort of Dilbert-esq buzzwords.
Instead, we should use sensory language and stories- like the urban legend about having your kidneys stolen. As Dan says, the lesson for advertisers is- it’s not enough to come up with a memorable campaign, it’s not enough to surprise people, it’s not enough to entertain people, the art of all this is to do all of those things in the service of the core message
Sure, Dan teaches at Duke University, my alma mater. But that’s not why I enjoyed talking with him so much. No, I like Dan because he managed to work kidney abduction, apples with razor blades, and drug use with household products all into one conversation.

Dan Heath Part I
24:00 10.9mb

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Radical Careering, Sally Hogshead Podcasts: Marketing + Branding insight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.