#225 Made to Stick奥运营销之广告文案六大步骤MADE TO STICKWhy Some Ideas Survive and Others DieCHIP HEATH and DAN HEATHCHIP HEATH is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His research focuses on why some ideas survive and ultimately thrive in the broader marketplace of ideas. Dr. Heaths articles have appeared in Scientific American, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, Business Week, Psychology Today, and Vanity Fair. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University and Stanford. DAN HEATH is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education. He is a former researcher for Harvard Business School who now specializes in designing and delivering corporate training programs. Mr. Heath, a graduate of Harvard Business School and the University of Texas at Austin, also co-founded Thinkwell Inc., a company that develops multimedia college textbooks. MAIN IDEA “Sticky” ideas are those that are highly memorable and exceptionally long-lasting in their impact. Everyone in business would like to develop ideas that are sticky, as would most parents when they are attempting to teach values to their children. So what exactly is it that makes an idea sticky in the first place? While there are no hard and fast formulas for developing a sticky idea, there is a short checklist of six principles that most of the successful sticky ideas of the past have tended to use: To develop sticky ideas, make your message: 1 Simple State the essential core of your idea succinctly 2 Unexpected Use surprise to grab peoples attention 3 Concrete Pack in solid ideas and images 4 Credible Embed credentials right into your message 5 Emotional Make the listener feel something6 Story-based Help people learn how they should respond “This is an idea success story. Even better, its a truthful idea success story. We wrote this book to help you make your ideas stick. By stick, we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impactthey change your audiences opinions or behavior. When we ask people how often they need to make an idea stick, they tell us the need arises between once a month and once a week. For managers, these are big ideas about new strategic directions and guidelines for behavior. Columnists try to change readers opinions on policy issues. Religious leaders try to share spiritual wisdom with their congregants. Nonprofit organizations try to persuade volunteers to contribute their time and donors to contribute their money to a worthy cause. Given the importance of making ideas stick, its surprising how little attention is paid to the subject.” Chip Heath and Dan Heath Trait 1 Simple State the Essential Core of Your Idea Succinctly Main IdeaThe ideal here is to create ideas that are both simple and profound, like proverbs that exist in every culture around the world. To come up with something profound, youll probably need to forego all of the supporting points you could mention and instead find a simple way to express one main point. This is not as easy as it sounds. Supporting IdeasWeed out Superfluous ElementsTo simplify your message doesnt mean to “dumb it down” or to make it into a fluffy “sound bite.” Instead, what youre trying to do is to get to the essential core of your idea. Usually, to get to that core, you have to weed out all of the superfluous elements that confuse rather than amplify or clarify. To create a sticky message, you have to then communicate the core idea and leave everything else out. Success storiesTo see how this is done in practice, consider some successful sticky messages: During Bill Clintons successful 1992 campaign for the Presidency of the United States, James Carville was one of Clintons key political advisors. He came up with three phrases that could become the core message of Clintons campaign. Of those three choices, one resonated well with everyone: “Its the economy, stupid.” This subsequently became the theme of Clintons campaign, even though Bill Clinton personally wanted to talk about lots of other things. His advisers kept bringing him back to this one single idea again and again, and eventually the voters got the idea. Everyone knows Southwest Airlines is a company that encourages its employees to have fun on the job, but that isnt what makes the company successful. Instead, Southwest focuses on just one single goal: to become THE lowest fare airline by reducing costs. As a result of that intensive focus, everyone knows where they stand with the companys management. If you have an idea that will help them cut costs, they will welcome you with open arms. If your new idea isnt aligned with that aim, they wont have much time to talk with you. In the 1980s, the United States Army changed the way it drafted its orders. Planners were aware that even their best laid plans were often made ineffective by