Made to Stick

Chip and Dan Heath

📚 GENRE: Business & Finance

📃 PAGES: 291

✅ COMPLETED: March 10, 2023

🧐 RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Short Summary

How do we make a message ‘stick’ with our audience? What makes a message sticky in the first place? In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the framework of a sticky message and how it can be used to deliver a message that both makes an impact and lasts.

Key Takeaways

1️⃣ Don’t Summarize! Create Curiosity — Avoid the temptation to simply summarize and force-feed information to readers. It’s boring and won’t stick with anyone. When writing copy, you have to first grab a person’s attention with your first sentence/headlines and then focus on building curiosity throughout the content to hold their attention. Rather than blasting your readers with facts, find a way to take the exact same information and deliver it in a way that generates curiosity. It takes some creativity. Have fun with it.

2️⃣ Create Mental Images — One of the keys to writing sticky content is finding ways to make information concrete by creating images in the reader’s mind. Use metaphors. Use analogies. We understand things so much better when we can picture it. Using your words to create an image in the reader’s mind can turn difficult, abstract information into something the reader can see and understand. Take every opportunity you can to connect your information with a mental image.  

3️⃣ Element of Surprise — One of the big challenges of communication is capturing attention. There is so much clutter in the world. So many things competing for our attention. How do we break through the clutter? The answer is using the element of surprise to break people’s thought patterns. When we see or hear something that we didn’t expect, it immediately gets our attention. Having this knowledge and using it at the beginning of your written content can help you get a person’s attention. From there it’s about using curiosity to hold their attention.

Favorite Quote

“The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Consistent sensory stimulation makes us tune out: Think of the hum of an air conditioner, or traffic noise, or the smell of a candle, or the sight of a bookshelf. We may become consciously aware of these things only when something changes: The air conditioner shuts off. Your spouse rearranges the books.”

Book Notes 📑

Introduction

  • Chip and Dan Heath — Chip and Dan Heath are the authors of this book and both work in education with a focus on what makes certain ideas ‘stick.’ At the time this book was published in 2007, Chip was a professor at Stanford University, while Dan worked at Duke University and was previously a researcher at Harvard University. 
  • Ideas That ‘Stick’ — We all want to communicate our ideas in a way that hits home with our audience and makes a true impact on people. We want our messages to change behavior. But that’s not always easy to do. There are certain key traits all highly memorable ideas have that make them ‘stick.’ The purpose of this book is to outline the six factors that make ideas stick with people. At a basic level, ideas that stick are typically understandable, memorable, and easy to retell. And if an idea is believable, it has the power to change behavior.
    • Ex. Movie Popcorn — In 1992, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) wanted to communicate to the world just how unhealthy movie theater popcorn was. Their research had determined that a medium-size bag of popcorn had 37 grams of saturated fat, 17 grams over the recommended daily limit by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The culprit was coconut oil, which theaters used to pop their popcorn. The CSPI decided to communicate their message by calling a press conference and lining up a bag of popcorn next to a bacon and egg breakfast, a Big Mac with fries, and a steak dinner. The bag of popcorn had more saturated fat than all of the items put together. The message ‘stuck’ and people stopped buying movie theatre popcorn. The theaters eventually announced they would not be using coconut oil anymore. 
    • Ex. Apple iPod — When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod in the early 2000s, he told the world that the iPod would allow a person to have, “1,000 songs in your pocket.” This was the messaging he used rather than discussing technical elements of the iPod like storage, speed, etc. The messaging he used ‘stuck’ with people immediately. 
  • Six Pillars of Stickiness (SUCCESs)— We can purposely create and communicate ideas in a way that maximizes stickiness. The following six principles (the acronym turns out to be SUCCESs) are found in most of the memorable and impactful ideas we encounter. By incorporating these six principles into our messaging, we can create ideas and messages that stick with people and inspire people to take the action we want them to take.
    • Simplicity — You lose a person when things get long and complicated. Your idea and messaging have to be simple. Steve Jobs was always looking to make Apple products as simple as he could possibly make them. 
    • Unexpectedness — People pay attention when something violates their expectations or catches them off guard. Surprises can capture attention. Building curiosity, as Joseph Sugarman discusses at length in the Adweek Copywriting Handbook, is another way to capture and maintain a person’s attention with your messaging. Any time somebody runs into something they weren’t expecting, it immediately gets their interest. 
    • Concreteness — How do we make our ideas clear? We have to explain ideas in terms of human actions and use sensory information. This is where the majority of business communication goes bad — information is stated in such a boring, ambiguous way to the point where the meaning of the message isn’t clear at all. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images.
      • Ex. Halloween — One of the myths that has stuck with a lot of people originated in the 1970s. People began to believe others were putting razors in apples/candy and handing them out to kids on Halloween. It caught on and hospitals actually offered to X-ray bags of candy. 
      • Ex. Drugs — The Ad Council once created an ad using a sizzling egg to describe how your brain reacts when on drugs. These are powerful images that immediately stick with people. 
    • Credibility — Sticky ideas are credible, and grasping for hard numbers or statistics to back up your message isn’t always the right answer.
    • Emotion — We get people to care about our ideas by tapping into their emotions; by getting them to feel something. People are more likely to act when your message makes them feel a certain emotion. Research has shown 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.
    • Stories — Stories tie all of the previous five steps together and help a person see your message in their mind. By telling a story with your message, you’re able to tap into a person’s emotions. Your message becomes a mental movie rather than a series of words on a screen. 
  • The Curse of Knowledge — Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. We have a certain level of knowledge about something and struggle to put it in terms people who have zero knowledge of the topic will understand clearly. The Curse of Knowledge is why so many people have a hard time getting their message across in a meaningful way. This is why the SUCCESs checklist is important to follow — adhering to the steps will allow you to craft messages that are informational yet easy to remember and understand.
    • Ex. Good — In 1961, President John F. Kennedy told the world: “We want to put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.”
    • Ex. Bad — President Kennedy could have instead made the mistake so many businesses seem to make by saying: “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically-targeted aerospace initiatives.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — Chip and Dan Heath have created a template to communicate your ideas in a way that sticks with people and inspires action. You can reduce the amount of meaningless ambiguity in a message and make almost any idea stickier using this six-pillar framework. Each of the following chapters will discuss one of the pillars at length. 

Ch. 1: Simple

  • Commander’s Intent (CI) — In 1980 the U.S. Army adapted its planning process by inventing a concept called the Commander’s Intent (CI). CI is a simple, direct goal that appears at the top of every order. Everybody in the unit has the CI at the top of their order sheet. The CI outlines the goal and the intent of the mission, and it’s everybody’s job to do what they need to do to execute the goal. The Army created this concept after realizing that outlining every step a solider needs to make in play-by-play style is inefficient and not practical.
    • Takeaway — In essence the Army’s CI distills all of the moving parts of a mission into one clear, direct, simple goal that everyone works towards. This is what you have to do with your ideas and messages. There needs to be one simple, clear goal for every message or writing assignment and it should be pinned at the top of the page. You then write to that goal. Your word selection, tone of voice, paragraph structure, and more will all be based on that goal you’re trying to execute. Just as a soldier in an Army mission, you have no direction without a simple and clearly stated goal to write to. 
  • Strive for Simple — Steve Jobs was always trying to remove things from Apple’s product designs whenever possible to make things simple and user friendly. The same concept applies to your messaging — you should strive for simplicity. This doesn’t mean using easy words or “dumbing things down” — it means identifying the one core thing you want to get across and eliminating or reducing any other noise that could interfere with that core message.
    • Quote (P. 27): “It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple… What we mean by simple is finding the core of the idea. Finding the core means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence.”
    • Quote (P. 28): “The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: ‘A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.’”
      • Takeaway — This quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery summarizes how Steve Jobs also approached product design and functionality at Apple. The same approach can be used to write content — you ideally want to strip away anything that distracts a reader from the core message you’re trying to get across. Write to the goal at the top of the page. 
  • Decision Paralysis — It’s human nature to struggle and feel a sense of anxiety when faced with uncertainty and multiple options.   Psychologists have proved as much over the years. This is partly why it’s important to narrow the focus of your message to one core idea. Your message gets overly complicated and causes stress on the reader when you start trying to get multiple ideas across to them. Focus on one core message. 
  • Interesting Fact — Skin damage from overexposure to the sun is like getting older: it is cumulative over the years and cannot be reversed. Once damage occurs, it cannot be undone. Sunburns are a physical signal of damage and eventually disappear, but the underlying damage of the burn to your skin does not. There are two types of ultraviolet rays — UVA and UVB. UVB cause burning of the skin or the red associated with sunburn, skin cancer, and premature aging of skin. UVA rays stimulate tanning, but are also linked to other problems, such as impaired vision, skin, rashes, and allergic or other reactions to drugs.
    • Quote (P. 39): “Tanning and burning are caused by ultraviolet rays from the sun. These rays cannot be seen or felt, but penetrate the skin and stimulate cells containing a brownish pigment called melanin. Melanin protects the skin by absorbing and scattering ultraviolet rays. People with dark skins have high amounts of melanin, have greater natural protection from ultraviolet rays, and tan more easily. Blondes, redheads, and people with fair skins have less melanin and, therefore, burn more quickly. As melanin is stimulated by ultraviolet rays, it rises to the skin’s surface as a tan and provides protection against future sun exposure.”
  • Analogies — Analogies are powerful because they substitute something easy to think about for something difficult. They invoke concepts that you already know. These can be helpful when trying to simplify your message and get it to ‘stick’ with people. Analogies have a way of helping us visualize a concept.
    • Ex. The Slippery Slide — In his book The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, Joseph Sugarman describes the complex process of gaining a reader’s attention and keeping it throughout the message using an analogy of a ‘slippery slide.’ You can immediately picture guiding a reader down the slide using curiosity and quality copy. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — Make your messages simple, compact, and focused on one core message that you want to get across. Remove anything that distracts from your core message. When you try to get multiple messages across to a reader you begin to overcomplicate things and lose him/her. Consider using analogies to make difficult content easier to understand. 

Ch. 2: Unexpected

  • Grabbing Attention — The first problem of communication is getting attention. But using the element of surprise is one of the best ways to do it. When you break a pattern, you immediately get someone’s attention because we’re all wired to notice changes or things that we weren’t expecting. Use the element of unexpectedness and surprise at the beginning of your message to grab attention. From there, focus on building curiosity as Joseph Sugarman discusses with the ‘Slippery Slide’ analogy in his book The Adweek Copywriting Handbook.  
    • Quote (P. 64): “The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Consistent sensory stimulation makes us tune out: Think of the hum of an air conditioner, or traffic noise, or the smell of a candle, or the sight of a bookshelf. We may become consciously aware of these things only when something changes: The air conditioner shuts off. Your spouse rearranges the books.”
    • Quote (P. 65): “We can’t succeed if our messages don’t break through the clutter to get people’s attention. Furthermore, our messages are usually complex enough that we won’t succeed if we can’t keep people’s attention.”
    • Quote (P. 66): “Naturally sticky ideas are frequently unexpected. If we can make our ideas more unexpected, they will be stickier.”
      • Takeaway — People are jarred out of their normal autopilot mode when you do or say something unexpected. The element of surprise and introducing something unexpected is most effective at the beginning of your content when it’s critical to grab attention. It’s especially useful in the first sentence of content. 
    • Ex. The Subtle Art of Not Gibing a F*ck — This book written by Mark Manson is a great example of using something unexpected to break a pattern of thinking and command attention. Nobody expects to see the word f*ck on a book cover. The title itself is unexpected and commands your attention. It makes you curious. This book is one of the best-selling books of all time. 
  • The Ad Council Enclave Commercial — A great example of using surprise to capture attention was the Ad Council’s ‘Buckle Up’ commercial. The beginning and middle part of the commercial sets the scene of a family driving in a neighborhood in a new Enclave minivan. The camera zooms in on the family and, out of nowhere, a speeding car broadsides the Enclave. The text ‘Didn’t see that coming?’ appears on the screen followed by ‘No one ever does. Buckle up… Always.’
  • Quote (P. 72): “Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other… it’s your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.”
    • Takeaway — You have to find ways to use the element of surprise and curiosity to get, build, and hold a person’s attention. People will not pay attention to your message if it sounds like something they’ve heard many times before or if the content is written using technical corporate language. 
  • Making Ideas Sticky — You can immediately begin making your content stickier by using three steps to start. These include:
    • Step 1 — Identify the central message you need to communicate. Find the core.
    • Step 2 — Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message (i.e. What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it already happening naturally?).
    • Step 3 — Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience’s guessing machine. Present it in an unexpected, surprising way. 
  • Journalism 101 — Writing content is more than just simply restating facts (who, what, when, where, and why); it’s about figuring out the point behind the facts and making that point clear to the audience. Nobody really cares about the details — they want to know what it means for them. 
  • Interesting Fact — The rings of Saturn are made of ice-covered dust containing pieces of comets, asteroids, or shattered moons that broke up before they reached the planet, torn apart by Saturn’s powerful gravity. 
  • Using Mystery — Although surprise is great for capturing attention in your first one or two sentences of copy, you have to build curiosity to hold attention throughout the piece. Mysteries are a great way to do this. Use questions to set the table and slowly begin answering those questions as you unwind the copy.
    • Ex. Saturn’s Rings — The following was used as an introduction in one scientist’s paper on Saturn’s rings: “How can we account for what is perhaps the most spectacular planetary feature in our solar system, the rings of Saturn? There’s nothing else like them. What are the rings of Saturn made of anyway? How could three internationally acclaimed groups of scientists come to wholly different conclusions on the answer? One at Cambridge University proclaimed they were gas. Another group, at MIT, was convinced that they were made up of dust particles; while the third, at Cal Tech, insisted they were comprised of ice crystals. How could this be, after all, each group is looking at the same thing, right?”
    • Ex. Class Lectures — One teacher decided to use mysteries to structure his lectures. He started the class by introducing a concept and posing a few questions, and spent the rest of the class investigating those questions before arriving at a conclusion at the end of class. This significantly helped him hold the attention of students in his class. 
  • Gap Theory of Curiosity — Gap Theory was discovered by behavioral economist George Leowenstein, who stated that curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge. When we want to know something but don’t already know it, it’s like having an itch that we have to scratch. We pay attention until we have the answer we need to close the gap.
    • Ex. YouTube Ad — I once sat through an entire 3-minute fitness YouTube ad because the guy set the table at the beginning by stating that one food in particular destroys testosterone levels in men. I watched the whole video ad to get the answer and he didn’t even answer the question! That’s a good example of what we’re talking about here, though. 
  • Don’t Summarize! Build Curiosity — Our tendency is to state facts endlessly. We force-feed facts until we’re blue in the face. This is no way to capture and hold a reader’s attention. To make our content stickier, we have to avoid the standard ‘summary’ delivery structure. Whenever possible, focus on building curiosity. To do this properly, you need to open gaps of curiosity (pose questions) before closing them (provide answers).
    • Quote (P. 85): “One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they’re missing. We can pose a question or a puzzle that confronts people with a gap in their knowledge. We can point out that someone else knows something they don’t. We can present them with situations that have unknown resolutions, such as elections, sports, events, or mysteries. We can challenge them to predict an outcome (which creates two knowledge gaps — What will happen? and Was I right?).”
      • Takeaway — The process of building curiosity involves opening and closing curiosity gaps. Rather than presenting information by simply summarizing it (which is boring), find a way to use the same exact set of facts/information in a structure that builds curiosity. There are many ways to structure content in a way that builds curiosity — be creative and find a way. Take readers down the ‘slippery slide.’
    • Quote (P. 85): “They (curiosity gaps) work because they tease you with something that you didn’t know — in fact, something that you didn’t care about at all; until you found out that you didn’t know it.”
      • Takeaway — Set the table by posing a question that the reader might not know, then focus on continuously building curiosity until you answer it at the end. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — You can use surprise to capture an audience’s attention and follow by purposely building curiosity (taking them down the ‘slippery slide’) to maintain their attention. Breaking a person’s expectations or pattern of thinking is one of the best ways to command and hold attention in your content. Keep the reader wanting more. 

Ch. 3: Concrete

  • Abstract vs. Concrete — We remember ideas that are concrete rather than abstract. If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete. If you’ve got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what they know, concrete is the only safe language. It’s all about creating a sensory experience for the audience. 
    • Ex. Cars — High Performance = Abstract | V8 Engine = Concrete 
    • Ex. Medical — What follows is a good example of using concrete language to help a reader understand a complex topic (acid and bacteria): The acid in the stomach is potent stuff – it can, obviously, eat through a thick steak, and it’s strong enough to dissolve a nail. It’s ludicrous to think that bacteria could survive in such an environment. It would be like stumbling across an igloo in the Sahara.
    • Quote (P. 106): “Concrete ideas are easier to remember. Take individual words, for instance. Experiments in human memory have shown that people are better at remembering concrete, easily visualized nouns (‘bicycle’ or ‘avocado’) than abstract ones (‘justice’ or ‘personality’).”
      • Takeaway — If you can see it in your mind, the idea is concrete. These are sticky ideas. Words that are more abstract are difficult to picture or imagine. These ideas or words don’t stick with people easily. Find a way to turn abstract ideas into concrete ones to get your message across. 
  • Convert Abstract Ideas — Some information you’re trying to convey will be naturally abstract. This is when you have to get creative. Two college professors once famously turned their semester-long accounting class into a case study where students ‘acted’ as the accountant to two imaginary friends who created a business. As the class went on, students were able to see the business develop and encounter various accounting concepts in a hands-on way. This is a great example of taking abstract material and making it concrete. Rather than reading meaningless words in a textbook, the students were actively engaging in the case study to learn how accounting works. When trying to write about naturally abstract ideas, ask yourself: “How can I make this concrete for the reader/audience?”
  • Chapter Takeaway — Try to avoid getting too complex or abstract with your messaging. Always remember that your reader likely doesn’t have a lot of information and it’s up to you to deliver your content in a way that is concrete and easy to understand. Delivering your content in a way that is concrete involves helping your reader visualize what you’re trying to say. 

Ch. 4: Credible

  • Building Credibility — Messages that are delivered by subject matter experts and people of authority (i.e. doctors, a CEO, etc.) come with automatic credibility. But there are ways you can build credibility with the way you go about crafting your message. Four great ways to build internal credibility within your message include:
    • Vivid Detail — The more vivid you are with your message, the more credible it appears. Try to be as detailed as you can. We all tend to believe a message that has a lot of details over a message that is pretty vague. 
    • Testimonials — Testimonials are a great way to build credibility for your company or product because people trust fellow customers more than the company itself. We all know the company is trying to sell us something, so there’s always a sense of skepticism about every message the company presents. But we don’t question other regular people like us who bought the product, enjoyed it, and went out of their way to voice their opinion. This is why customer reviews and ratings are so influential and bring so much credibility to your message. You can also use testimonials from business people outside your organization who have bought and enjoyed your product. Try to incorporate positive testimonials whenever possible. 
    • Testable Credential — One great way to build curiosity while getting your audience involved and boosting the credibility of your message is to use a testable credential, which is basically the practice of challenging your audience. You’re asking them to do something to prove your point. Pose a question to the reader/audience or ask them to do something specific that will prove your point after they’ve answered the question or done what you’ve asked them to do.
      • Ex. Coaching Seminar — One coaching seminar asked coaches in the room to imagine a player blowing the game somehow, turn to the coach sitting next to him, and say 10 insults about the player. That was easy to do. The coaches were then asked to say 10 things to build that player up after he blew the final shot. Many of the coaches struggled to name even a few. The point the speaker was trying to make is that coaches need to work hard at building players up, no matter what. By getting the coaches engaged using an activity, the speaker made the message more credible and memorable/sticky. You can use testable credentials in speeches or in writing content. 
    • Statistics — Statistics bring a lot of credibility, but they are meaningless by themselves. Statistics should almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It’s more important for people to remember the relationship than the number. Eyes glaze over when people read abstract statistics — you have to find a way to make the statistic concrete and real by putting it in perspective somehow. Doing this brings much more meaning and impact to your statistic. It makes it stickier.
      • Ex. Beyond War — An organization called Beyond War was started in the 1980s to show people how out of control the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had become. The organization took a statistic — there were 5,000 nuclear warheads in the world and just one could wipe out a city — and made it real. Leaders of the organization went around to different audiences demonstrating the power of that statistic. They would start by dropping one BB into a bucket (Hiroshima). The audience would hear the rattling of the BB in the bucket. They would then drop 10 BBs in the bucket (the number of warheads on a submarine). The audience would hear louder rattling. Then the audience was told to close their eyes while the demonstrator poured 5,000 BBs into a large bucket. The sound was intense, long, and horrifying. The demonstration cemented the statistic by making it real and concrete. 
      • Ex. Popcorn — The saturated fat/popcorn statistic from earlier in the book is also a good example. The fact that there was 37 grams of saturated fat in a medium bag of movie theater popcorn is bad, but it’s hard to understand it. By showing that there was more saturated fat in that bag of popcorn than in an egg breakfast, McDonalds Big Mac, and a steak dinner combined made the statistic real. 
      • Quote (P. 150): “When we use statistics, the less we rely on the actual numbers, the better. The numbers inform us about the underlying relationship, but there are better ways to illustrate the underlying relationship and the numbers themselves.”
        • Takeaway — To make statistics memorable and sticky, you have to find ways to make them real by humanizing them. Otherwise, people just roll their eyes for the most part when they read a data point. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — Your message doesn’t have to be delivered by an industry expert or somebody with high status for it to be credible. There are tactics you can use to build credibility within the message. Most statistics add credibility to a message but lack the context needed to stick; always try to humanize data when using stats. 

Ch. 5: Emotion

  • Mother Teresa Effect — Mother Teresa once said: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” People are more likely to support individuals rather than groups. When people feel overwhelmed by the scale of a problem, they’re more likely to view their potential donation as meaningless compared to the prospect of helping an individual directly.
    • Rokia Case Study — In 2004 researchers tested this effect. People were given $5 and asked to consider a donation to Save the Children. One group was given an information packet containing stats about child suffering and starvation going on in Africa and was asked to donate. The other was given an information packet containing information about Rokia, a young girl in Africa suffering from starvation and malnutrition and was asked to make a donation to Rokia through Save the Children. On average, the people who read the statistics packet contributed $1.14. The people who read about Rokia contributed $2.38 — more than twice as much.
      • Quote (P. 167): “The researchers theorized that thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mind. When people think analytically, they are less likely to think emotionally. And the researchers believed it was people’s emotional response to Rokia’s plight that led them to act.”
        • Takeaway — We respond better to individuals than to abstract causes. We feel more of an emotional connection to individuals over groups.
  • Benefits > Features — People care about themselves and how they are going to benefit from something. Your content should be focused on how your offering will help the person receiving the message. How will it benefit his/her life? Focus on benefits over features. 
  • Chapter Takeaway — People are more likely to act when they feel something. Find ways to tap into human emotion in your messaging. Always remember that people feel more empathy when thinking in terms of individuals rather than groups. 

Ch. 6: Stories

  • Storytelling — Using stories is a great way to make ideas stickier with your audience. Stories have a natural way of simplifying complex material. We understand stories. Delivering your information in the structure of a story is always a good idea worth considering. 

Epilogue: What Sticks

  • Sticky Framework — Another way of thinking about the SUCCESs checklist is to remember the five things you’re trying to accomplish with your audience in every piece of communication. If you can get your audience to do these five things below by creating a captivating message, your ideas will stick. The way you accomplish these five things is by incorporating the principles in the SUCCESs sticky checklist. 
    • Pay Attention 
    • Understand and Remember
    • Agree/Believe
    • Care
    • Take Action