Software Journal

A few days ago Jason, a student from my past “Design and Analysis of Algorithms” class approached me at GWU’s Gelman library and as we stood there talking, he mentioned something about Quick Sort and Robert Sedgewick.  I was genuinely surprised that he remembered that particular aspect from the algorithms class a year ago.   And then I remembered that Sedgewick was the hero of a story that I had told in the lecture.  The story had stuck after all.  This was also around the time that I had finished reading “Made to Stick”, and I couldn’t help but wonder what had made the particular story stick for the student.  When I started teaching twin lectures on “Online Algorithms”, I tried to weave the story of my skiing into the online ski rental problem – time will tell whether that particular attempt at using a story to tell a point was successful or not.

When I first started reading “Made to Stick”, my honest first opinion (now a bit embarrassing) was that these guys are just trying to piggy back on the success of “The Tipping Point“, since it talks very significantly about the stickiness principle. So, it appeared that Made to Stick was going to be color commentary on Tipping Point. But “Made to Stick” turns out to be a very natural extension of the tipping point book, in the sense that it actually teaches how to make ideas sticky.

The central premise of Made to Stick is that ideas can be made sticky, using six ideas, some (or all) of which are often found in sticky ideas.

• S (Simple): Simplicity is the beginning premise of many great things, and naturally applies to ideas as well. Recall JFK’s iconic statement from May 25, 1961, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” Using this simple (yet concrete) statement which was devoid of any buzzwords and ambiguities, JFK was able to motivate an entire nation in doing extra ordinary things.  However, the story about Southwest Airlines’ simple focus on frugality seems to suffer from the halo effect. There are countless other businesses whose focus on frugality has rendered them ineffective in competing with other businesses that are higher priced but provide a better customer experience.
• U (Unexpected): Every idea that we present has the natural problem that it can just seem “obvious”.  It can just seem like “Of Course”?  If that happens, then our idea is lost.  Then concept that we have to use to our advantage is to present a surprise – something that appears at least slightly counter intuitive.  That surprise holds the audience’s attention.
• C (Concrete): Like Subway’s Jared, one concrete example of success is worth more than a thousand conceptual examples.
• C (Credible): Every testimonial that we write, obviously, our goal is that that testimonial should be considered believable.
• E (Emotional): [Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book]: Using two fascinating stories (studies), the authors point out the effects of the emotional aspects of message.
  • In one story, people are provided some cash by mechanism of mock survey, and then are provided with an opportunity to donate that money to a cause in Africa.  Two different (and subsequently a third) message are provided to the prospective donors.  First message provides a summary of the economic suffering of Africa.  Second message provides one person’s suffering and how any money that is contributed can help that person for a long long time.  Donors receiving second message contributed on average about twice as much money compared to the donors receiving the first message.  A subsequent third message provided both the overall summary and story of one person.  This message also evoked approximately the same return as the first message.  So, what is the reason for this distinction?  Well, people make buying choice using emotion, not always a logic pathway.  At least in the case of donation, people may be likely to believe (rationally) that donations do not help.
  • The second story compares the “The Truth” campaign with the “Think, Don’t Smoke” campaign.  Again, by using the emotional versus analytical aspect of decision making, we can compare how the truth campaign has been so effective, while the “Think, Don’t Smoke” campaign by Philip Morris has been so ineffective.  NYTimes says about the latter:
    

    “New research shows that the ads aimed at youths had no discernible effect in discouraging smoking and that the ads currently aimed at parents may be counterproductive.”

• S (Story): In one of Heath’s classes, he had students give a short presentation, and students had a chance to observe whose presentation was best remembered.  Stories are much easier to remember than even cutesie sound bytes, which are themselves easier to remember than pithy titles, which are themselves easier to remember than statistical highlights.  This reinforces something that most good speakers know, but backs that up by actual research (even if a small study).

After reading this book, I have revised much of our marketing material – perhaps the biggest change was in the “Unexpected” and “Emotional” aspects.