Made to Stick
Chip Heath, Dan Heath · 2007 · 8 ideas · 8 min
Ideas spread not because they're true or important, but because they're built with the same six ingredients — simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and story — that make urban legends outlast press releases.
Why this book
The Heath brothers ask why some ideas — urban legends, conspiracy theories, proverbs — spread for decades with zero marketing budget, while carefully researched, important truths from experts and institutions routinely get ignored or forgotten. Their answer is that "stickiness" is a craft with identifiable components, which they compress into the acronym SUCCESs: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and told as a Story. Ideas that hit most of these criteria stick in memory and get repeated; ideas that don't, however true or important, tend to evaporate on contact.
The book matters because it treats communication as a solvable design problem rather than a matter of charisma or luck, giving anyone — teachers, marketers, managers, activists — a diagnostic checklist for why a message isn't landing and concrete techniques to fix it.
Who should read it
This is essential for anyone whose job depends on getting an idea to survive contact with a busy, distracted audience — teachers, marketers, public health communicators, managers delivering a vision, or writers trying to make an abstract point land. It's less useful for readers looking for persuasion tactics divorced from having something substantively true and useful to say.
About the author
Chip Heath is a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and Dan Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University's CASE center; the brothers have co-written several bestselling books on ideas, decision-making, and change.