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“Made to Stick” – Book Review
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”
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/opinion/27mon1.html
November 22nd, 2010
The Tipping Point – The “Stickiness” Factor
In the “Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell allocates a generous portion of the book to the quality of “stickiness” – does your marketing message stick? The premise is that small, subtle changes to your message (or website, or product) can make a big difference in its perception. The book talks about social psychologist Howard Leventhal’s classic “Fear Experiment“, in which 2 versions of tetanus booklet were shown to the university students. One version was a “high fear” version (containing gory pictures) and the other one was a more objective version containing same factual information but without any gory pictures. The “high fear” version provoked much higher initial response rate (expression of how many people wanted to get vaccination) than the low fear version, but when it came to actually getting the shots, both versions evoked a pathetic 3% response rate. However, a simple change in booklet (including a map of the campus with health center circled and times shot were available) tipped the vaccination report to 28%. This changed the information in the brochure to practical and personal action initiating information, rather than just an academic exercise.
This is not the same as saying that small changes can accumulate to make a big difference (although that is true as well). Gladwell’s message is that the small changes (even by themselves) can make a big difference.
Applying the principle of stickiness
Having bought into the stickiness factor, question becomes how to apply this to your actual problem – product, blog, website, presentation, etc.
Product
One of the known best practices in product design is called the DYNO (Disturb Your Neighbor / Officemate) routine. The basic idea is that when you finish doing some activity, go ask some neighbor to come take a look at your product (and possibly trash talk it). This applies whether your “product” is a software, a hardware, a literary article or a kitchen. This also applies whether your neighbor is a software developer, the receptionist, the CFO, the senior staff scientist or the sales guy. The kinds of feedback that we can get simply from our neighbors goes significantly beyond what we might be able to get from a very thorough (and possibly expensive) user test. Back in the days when I was a software consultant at Verizon, I helped rewrite a portion of the billing logic using WebLogic integrating with IBM mainframe application. After getting some output snapshots, just out of pride, I sent them to 4 unfortunate “neighbors”. Besides learning that this is simply not the “Verizon” way of doing things (that too without a full QA supported UAT, PAT, SAT, DAT, RAT and 700 other Ts – imagine that!), I also learnt that: (i) my app blew up if there were exactly 99 records, (ii) my app was retrieving 10 records, but showing only 9, (iii) the “Bill” icon was actually the invoice icon, and most importantly that (iv) my neighbors didn’t really mind if I didn’t bother them too often.
In a more mature setting, it is still very possible that you find nuggets of gold from your neighbors testing your product, and it is very likely that all your neighbors will point out different nuggets. We as human beings are sufficiently different to have different reactions to the same input. And yes, your lunch buddy or your neighbor’s lunch buddy who just happens to be in the vicinity when you finished your product qualifies 100% as a neighbor for the DYNO routine. Diversity trumps profile or interest by a significant margin.
In “Glimmer”, author Warren Berger makes a very similar point when talking about Sam Farber’s company OXO Good Grips.
..so many of the company’s products can be traced to someone asking why a common device couldn’t be made a little bit better or why an everyday task couldn’t be made (a little bit) easier.
Websites (and Web Applications)
As a direct application of Gladwell’s stickiness principle, in Steve Krug’s legendary book “Don’t Make Me Think“, every change appears to be a small change. The material is the same, the flow is roughly the same. Still, the impact of each change is quite significant.
The first version of the BizMerlin resource project assignment report showed data essentially in the following table format.
The very next version of BizMerlin (I believe v3.0) had this slight improvement to the user project assignment report. Essentially, when you would hover over a project or a resource, it would highlight all users and projects that that user (or project) are allocated to. Looking at the picture below, hovering over “Cloud Computing”, we can see that Andy Jones is assigned to it 100% and Don Lee and Melissa Peters are assigned at 50% each. Simple, subtle change that saves valuable time during each resource allocation review meeting.
Presentations (and Brochures)
However, if there is one place where the stickiness factor applies more than others, it is clearly in case of presentations and printed materials like brochures. I believe this is due to the fact that with presentations and brochures, the user (the reader, the ideal passer by) has exceedingly short duration during which the material must seize the initiative and stick. If the moment is gone, it is gone. With physical products and software applications, the user may be fortunately/unfortunately locked in for a little bit of time, but with a presentation, the speaker usually has less than 2 minutes to captivate the audience, or it will zone you out and decide to work on presentations of their own – even if they have to sit through yours.
Testing the stickiness factor using A/B testing and other techniques
A/B testing (also called split testing) is a marketing method used to test the effectiveness of two options – kind of like when an optometrist asks – “Is A better, or is B better?” The positive aspect of this method is that it is fairly simple to use and fairly simple to deploy. Google Adwords even allows a/b testing as an “easy” version within website optimizer. The negative aspect is that the insights to draw from the results of the A/B test are far from straightforward. While it may be true that version “A” of your product is better than the version “B”, it may be harder to draw insights that apply to other circumstances (other products, etc). The hidden challenge is that the different versions of website (or product, or presentation) do not evolve in a way that are amenable to local optimization – in other words, a much better of product cannot be created by making many “positive” changes to a product, rather, it must go through some negative changes as well, on the path to a significantly positive change. One of the early leaders in A/B testing was Amazon. If you haven’t yet, you should read Brian Eisenberg’s Amazon.com analysis here.
<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003H4RAO0?ie=UTF8&tag=standwisdo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B003H4RAO0″>Glimmer</a>
September 22nd, 2010
Public Speaking books and resources
Just finished reading 10 Days to More Confident Public Speaking by Lenny Laskowski. Can’t really recommend it, the book is largely just OK. It spends a bit too long in the logistics of the presentation that it appears obsolete just a few years later. As an example, the projectors have changed significantly in the past few years, so chances of you carrying a backup bulb and replacing one during your presentation (and the hazard of burning your hand in the process of doing it) seem rather low.
I am just starting to read The 7 Principles of Public Speaking, by Richard Zeoli. I will let you know how this one goes.