Stick First, Then Spread

The Core Insight

Elizabeth Newton ran a Stanford experiment in 1990 with a list of 25 well known songs. Tappers picked one and tapped the rhythm on a table. Listeners guessed 3 of 120 songs, a hit rate of 2.5 percent. The tappers had predicted 50 percent. They landed the message one time in 40 and expected one time in two.

The tapper hears the song. The listener hears disconnected taps. Chip and Dan Heath call the gap the Curse of Knowledge. Once you know something, you cannot imagine not knowing it. The founder writing the launch post is the tapper, and the market is the listener.

Made to Stick treats the disease inside one head. Jonah Berger wrote Contagious, published in 2013, about the trip between heads. Heath asks why an idea survives a week in memory. Berger asks why a person repeats it to someone else.

Most teams treat spread as a channel problem and buy reach. Berger asked hundreds of students and executives what share of word of mouth happens online. The average guess was around 50 percent, and some said upward of 70. The measured figure from Keller Fay is 7 percent. People spend close to two hours a day online and more than eight times as much time offline.

The Framework

Made to Stick runs two steps. Find the core, then translate the core through a checklist the authors spell SUCCESs.

• Simple means finding the core and cutting until nothing else can come out.
• Unexpected breaks the pattern the audience was guessing along, then repairs it with insight.
• Concrete means things you can examine with your senses, usually specific people doing specific things.
• Credible earns belief through vivid details, human-scale numbers, or a claim the audience can test.
• Emotional makes people care, because belief on its own does not produce action.
• Story supplies a simulation of how to act and the motivation to act.

Contagious runs one list of six, spelled STEPPS, and each item is a reason a person opens their mouth.

• Social Currency covers what makes the teller look good, and more than 40 percent of talk is personal experience.
• Triggers are environmental cues that put a product back in mind at a useful moment.
• Emotion moves an idea when arousal is high and stalls it when arousal is low.
• Public means the behavior is visible, because people copy what they can see.
• Practical Value is news the receiver can use, mostly about saving time or money.
• Stories carry the message inside a plot people want to retell.

Emotion appears by name on both lists, and Story closes both. Concreteness has no letter in Berger and carries most of his examples anyway.

Triggers, Public, and Practical Value have no counterpart in Made to Stick. Those three are transmission mechanics. Simple and Credible have no counterpart in Contagious. Berger tests whether an idea moves, and belief and compression sit outside that test.

Key Ideas

Find the Core Before You Write a Word

The Army writes a Commander's Intent at the top of every order. Colonel Tom Kolditz describes what survives after the plan breaks. You lose the ability to execute the plan and keep the responsibility of executing the intent.

Herb Kelleher compressed Southwest into five words: we are THE low-fare airline. A chicken Caesar salad on the Houston to Las Vegas route does not make Southwest the low-fare airline, so the salad does not exist.

Compression works because choice paralyzes. A grocery jam tasting with six jars generated ten times as many sales as one with twenty-four. In 401(k) plans, every ten more funds on offer cuts employee retirement saving by 1 percent.

Concrete Is the Only Language Both Sides Speak

Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. Art Silverman had a number and no traction. The USDA recommends at most 20 grams of saturated fat a day, and a medium bag of coconut-oil movie popcorn carried 37 grams. A bar graph was too rational for the room.

On September 27, 1992 he laid out a buffet for the cameras. One medium bag, he said, carried more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries, and a steak dinner combined. Three theater chains dropped coconut oil.

The Nature Conservancy hit the same wall. Mediterranean climate zones hold more than 20 percent of the world's plant species on 2 percent of its landmass. Donors cannot picture an easement. So the group started counting landscapes and set a goal of fifty over ten years. Five landscapes a year sits inside a donor's imagination, and two million acres a year sits outside it.

Credibility runs on the same fuel. Michigan researchers varied only the level of detail in a balanced mock custody transcript. Jurors hearing the favorable arguments in vivid detail rated the mother 5.8 out of 10. Jurors hearing the unfavorable ones vividly rated her 4.3. The details carried no information about the case.

One Named Person Outsells the Aggregate

Carnegie Mellon researchers paid participants 5 dollars in five one-dollar bills, then handed each an envelope and a Save the Children letter. The statistics letter described a 42 percent maize drop in Zambia and more than 11 million Ethiopians needing food aid. It raised 1.14 dollars on average. A letter about Rokia, one seven-year-old girl in Mali, raised 2.38 dollars. The letter carrying both raised 1.43 dollars, nearly a dollar less than Rokia alone.

Priming reproduced the split with no change in content. Participants given an arithmetic problem gave 1.26 dollars, and participants asked how the word baby makes them feel gave 2.34 dollars. The act of calculating suppressed the giving. Teens who saw the Truth campaign were 66 percent less likely to start smoking within the year. Teens who saw the Philip Morris spots were 36 percent more likely.

Berger scanned the New York Times home page every fifteen minutes for six months. The crawl captured almost seven thousand articles and the most-emailed list. Awe-inspiring pieces were 30 percent more likely to make the list, and sad ones 16 percent less. Anger and anxiety both raised sharing. High arousal carries the article, and contentment suppresses it.

Half his Wharton lab sat still for sixty seconds and half jogged in place. Of the joggers, 75 percent shared the article they read afterward, more than twice the relaxed group.

Chip Heath's students give one-minute speeches carrying 2.5 statistics each, and one student in ten tells a story. After a distraction, 63 percent of listeners recall the stories and 5 percent recall any individual statistic.

A Frequent Trigger Beats a Clever Campaign

Berger ran hundreds of campaigns through BzzAgent, a network of more than 800,000 unpaid agents. Interest, novelty, and surprise predicted immediate word of mouth and nothing beyond it. Frequently triggered products got 15 percent more word of mouth of both kinds.

Kit Kat sales were declining around 5 percent a year by 2007, and management refused to fund television. Colleen Chorak found people ate the bar on a break with a hot drink, and bought radio pairing the two. Sales rose 8 percent by year end and by a third after twelve months. Coffee beat hot chocolate on frequency alone.

Students rated a dining-hall slogan about trays less than half as attractive as a healthy-living slogan. Students who saw the tray slogan and used trays ate 25 percent more fruit and vegetables. In the 2000 Arizona election, more than ten thousand extra people voted for a school tax where the polling place was a school.

Observable Behavior Is What Gets Copied

Nike planned 5 million Livestrong wristbands at 1 dollar each, and Armstrong's agent called it a poor idea. Scott MacEachern made them yellow, a color people almost never wear. The first 5 million sold within six months, and more than 85 million have sold since. Movember started in Melbourne in 2003 as a 30-person moustache contest and has raised more than 174 million dollars since.

Visibility cuts both ways. Congress spent almost 1 billion dollars on the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign between 1998 and 2004. Bob Hornik found that kids who saw the ads were more likely to smoke marijuana. The ads said drugs are bad and that many other kids use them. Koreen Johannessen ran the repair at Arizona by publishing the true norm, and heavy drinking fell by almost 30 percent.

The Brand Has to Sit Where the Knife Is

Allport and Postman lost around 70 percent of story details in the first five or six retellings of a telephone study. What survived sharpened around the critical detail, two men arguing and one holding a knife.

Ron Bensimhon belly-flopped off the three-metre board at the 2004 Athens Olympics in a tutu with GoldenPalace.com painted on his chest. Everyone told the story and nobody mentioned the casino. Evian's Roller Babies passed 50 million views and became the most viewed online ad on record. Evian lost market share that year, and sales dropped almost 25 percent.

Dove's Evolution cost a little over 100,000 dollars, drew more than 16 million views, and produced double-digit sales growth. Jared Fogle is the exhibit both books claim. He weighed 425 pounds with a 60-inch waist and lost almost 100 pounds in three months on Subway subs. Subway sales were flat in 1999, rose 18 percent in 2000, and rose 16 percent in 2001.

Practical Applications

Write the Commander's Intent for your next launch before writing anything else. One sentence, the thing that must hold if nothing else lands. Then test it against a real trade-off the way Southwest tested the chicken Caesar salad.

Replace every aggregate with one named person. The Rokia gap is a factor of two, and adding the statistics back destroys it. Name the customer, and cut the market-size slide out of the announcement.

Pick the trigger before the copy. Name a cue that already fires daily in the buyer's environment, then pair the product with it in every message. Berger calls that set of cues a habitat, and frequency grows it faster than cleverness.

Frame the price against a reference point. In a hundred-person test, 75 percent bought a grill marked down from 350 dollars to 250. Only 22 percent bought the same grill marked from 255 dollars to 240, which was the lower final price. Under 100 dollars, quote the percentage. Over 100 dollars, quote the dollars.

Build the visible artifact. Ask what the customer wears, shows, or leaves behind after buying. Tell the story out loud with your brand removed, and if it still works you have built the Evian ad.

Who This Is For

Founders who have to explain something new get the most from the pair. Made to Stick is the better book for docs, pitches, and internal strategy, where Simple and Concrete do most of the work. Contagious is the better book when strangers have to repeat something without being paid.

Skip both if you sell to a committee on a two-year cycle with a handful of buyers. The machinery assumes a population of people who talk to each other.

Both books are built the same way, and the method has a hole. The authors picked campaigns that already worked, then read the mechanism backward out of the win. Nobody counted the launches that ran the same six traits and died, so the base rate is absent from both books. Berger concedes part of this, saying a product can win on two of the six.

Several of Berger's figures come from his own working papers and classroom exercises. The 6,500-brand study and the grill scenarios at a hundred people each both sit there. His claim that word of mouth beats advertising ten times over never defines the unit. Heath leans on social psychology whose priming and behavioral-cue results have replicated poorly since publication, and the calculation-priming finding sits in that family. Take the mechanisms and re-measure every rate in your own funnel.

The Decision

Take the next thing you plan to announce and run it through two gates in order.

Gate one is memory. State the core in one sentence. Name the concrete object a reader can picture, and name the one person the story is about. If the core needs a second sentence, it is not found yet.

Gate two is transmission. Name the daily cue that brings the idea back to mind. Name what a customer can show other people after buying. Then tell the story with your brand removed, and check whether it still holds together.

Run both gates on the next launch post before it ships. An idea that clears gate one and fails gate two dies in the one head that had it.