Made to Stick

Some ideas are “stick-worthy” while others are not and the traditional advice to make ideas stick, such as knowing your audience, making eye contact, practice, and repetition, tends to have limited effectiveness.

In Made to Stick, authors Chip and Dan Heath argue that people remember ideas that contain a simple, proverb-like message, are unexpected, are concrete in description, credible in nature, evoke emotion, or are presented as stories. These Six Principles of Sticky Ideas, compacted into the acronym SUCCESs, serve as a blueprint for making ideas and messages more effective and memorable.

The authors provide evidence-based research that explores what makes some ideas more memorable than others and offer scores of examples of marketing campaigns from the last few decades supporting their conclusions.