Thousands of ideas are pitched every single day. Businessmen with the newest product idea, politicians with a bill proposal, even students submitting a midterm paper all have ideas that they are sharing with others in hopes of positive results. With so many ideas being thrown in the air all the time, it is easy to understand why so many go unnoticed or receive negative feedback. In a world of millions of ideas, it can seem impossible for one to stand out as individual and exciting.
This is what the book Made to Stick by brothers Chip and Dan Heath hopes to answer; how do you make your one idea ‘stick’ with people? In other words, how do you make an idea memorable and make those you are pitching it to want to act upon it?
While this task may seem impossible, it is easy to think of ideas that have ‘stuck’ over the years. With the internet and social media, many ideas go viral every day. Videos on YouTube can gain millions of views in an incredibly short period. A short and simple tweet can gain worldwide attention within a week. News stories, no matter how factual, can spread like wildfire across both state and country lines.
While these ideas are spreading around like a common cold, they can morph and adapt and change. In some cases, like the businessman trying to pitch a new product idea, this can become a great thing as his idea gains traction and becomes greater and more inspired by the opinions of others. In other cases, like a news story, and idea morphing and changing can be disastrous. This is how ‘fake news’ is spread, as people like to add details to accounts to make them more interesting but might not be grounded in facts.
For copywriting specifically, making ideas sticky is crucial because an advertiser has essentially failed if no one sees or pays attention to their ad. The whole point of advertising is to present your company to consumers and to stand out in the sea of competitors. For my job at the church, I have begun to use some of the sticky ideas as my job requires copywriting and marketing skills every single day. I make content regularly, and my goal is to get it out to the masses and for them to enjoy it and my ideas to stick with them so that they think about attending events the church has that they may not have otherwise known about. I will give a few examples throughout this paper of how the idea of stickiness has helped me to be a better advertiser and copywriter, and how I’m able to get ideas through to my boss better than I would have been able to previously.
In any case, people want their ideas to be memorable and want them to be recognized at original and creative. This book lays out some simple guidelines for creatives to follow if they desire for their ideas to stick with those around them. These guidelines are that every idea should be simple, unexpected, credible, concrete, emotional, and a story. While all of these can be hard to apply to every single idea one has, they all contain elements that are easy to apply across the board to every unique idea and can help make these ideas ‘stick’.
The first checkpoint to being ‘SUCCESsful,’ as the book calls their checklist, is to have a simple idea. The book notes a lot of simple ideas through its course, from the kidney heist that takes up the first pages, to how Subway found a star in Jared and put his weight-loss journey across their ads, to boiling down prejudice so young children can understand what discrimination feels like. All of these are trimmed down to being simple ideas anyone can understand. You don’t have to be a surgeon to know that having your kidney removed forcefully is not good for you. You don’t have to be a dietician to understand eating healthy can help you to lose weight. These are simple ideas that we already know and that complex-idea-makers choose to capitalize on.
How do you take a hard message and make it simple? The book lays it out in plain terms: find the core of the idea. Typically this will be a short phrase with simple words and a lack of technical jargon. For Southwest Airlines, it is that they are “THE low-cost airline.” One of my best friends works at Southwest, so the stories of decisions made behind the scenes to keep that mantra alive resonated well with the stories my friend tells me about working at Love Field. Texas Wesleyan’s slogan is ‘Smaller. Smarter.’ which helps the people here in various positions make decisions that would benefit that core belief. Would this decision make us bigger and dumber? If so, we probably shouldn’t do that. Choices that make us feel closer to our fellow students and faculty, however, fit perfectly into our slogan, and those are the decisions that the people in power should make if they want to keep up our reputation.
At my job, when I pitch ideas, I usually look up dozens of statistics, visual examples, prices quotes, and whatever else I may need to back-up my idea. All of this means nothing, however, if I cannot initially catch my bosses’ attention. When I want to launch a new video series on social media, I don’t immediately approach with the pie charts and research, but I lay out for them my core idea in a one-sentence summary that establishes what I want the idea to be. If that hooks them, then I begin to explain the benefits and how the individual pieces would come together. Additionally, when ideas go out to the public, my goal is for the church members to remember them, and keeping things short and sweet is the easiest way to do that.
Next, the book shows that ideas that are unexpected gain traction much quicker than those that are typical. In the cases of urban legends, an unexpected ending is almost always ahead of the reader, whether the person in the story winds up kidney-less in a bathtub or killed by a gang after eggs were thrown at his windshield. This is why these horror stories stay in our memories so well – the end is unexpected and surprising to a viewer.
Take blockbuster movies as an example. While many follow a cliché pattern and can be somewhat predictable, the moment when a lead character is on top of the world and is suddenly shot will always surprise the audience, and most crowds will remember that scene much better than they can remember an earlier more predictable situation. Avengers: Infinity War takes expectation subversion to a whole other level as audiences think as the runtime timer gets under five minutes that the heroes have just won the day and our bad guy has been killed. The gasp that echoed in the theater when this turned out to not be the case was almost deafening, and this quickly became the most memorable scene in the movie. It is because audiences got an unexpected twist that brought them away from how they were sure the story was going to go.
The book also discusses how humans are naturally curious, and we desire to know the end of something. If a teacher asks “Knock-knock?” at the beginning of class then moves on with the lesson, students will be waiting to find out “Who’s there?” throughout the lecture. The same principle applies to sticky ideas. A few weeks ago, I took a picture of a staff member’s desk at my work, edited it a little bit so some details were blurred, then popped it on social media and asked, “Whose desk do you think this is?” While the actual content creation part of that was straightforward, the post lit up with guesses from the people in the church, and even some staff members keyed in because they had no idea. It was a simple question, and I gave out an answer the next day, yet it was our most successful post to date because I presented a curiosity gap to everyone that saw the post, and all of them wanted to know the answer. In other copywriting and advertising positions this can also apply, as people want to know the answer to every question presented to them, even if it’s silly and trivial and won’t help them get any farther in life.
The book then talks about credibility and how to achieve that. While one might immediately think an expert in the field would be a go-to, and in some cases that might be the best route to take, often everyday people can be the best authorities out there (in fact, the book refers to them as the anti-authority.) These are people that may be formally uneducated, but from hands-on experience are the experts on a particular topic. The book discusses a lady that used to smoke and how she became the anti-authority used in smoking ads. People aren’t as likely to listen to a doctor staring at a camera rattling off why smoking is bad for them, but if they show a lady with wrinkles, patches of hair missing, a raspy voice, and dark eyes, people are likely to pay attention. It is obvious this lady is credible as she knows from experience how smoking can ruin a life, even if she has never studied it a day in her life.
Outside of content creation at my job, I also help with leading worship time for the children, and a big annual event we have is Vacation Bible School, so I always help with the opening rally getting all the kids excited for the night with music and silliness. Each year, I make a point of asking volunteers what they thought went well and what could be done better. While I also typically have this conversation with the children’s minister and the worship minister at the church, the volunteers are able to give me an outside, ‘normal’ point-of-view I might not have otherwise gotten. For making content, I love to run videos and ideas by my friends, who are not as creative-minded as I am. While I look at a lot of technical details, they tend to look at the big picture and can tell me what to improve based on that. My friends are not educated on what I do, but I consider them my personal experts because they can tell me what I can do to improve my video and graphic creation skills.
Concreteness is achieved through making an idea like Velcro – a lot of hooks to grab those that have a few empty loops. What, exactly, does this mean? The concept of Velcro is very visual. Many people remember having shoes as a kid that used Velcro to secure them. Many theater geeks have seen plenty of Velcro used on costumes so that quick changes may be achieved. In the same way that the idea of Velcro is a very concrete one, our ideas should also be concrete. Additionally, the Velcro is a double-sided metaphor, as it is easy to think of thousands of tiny hooks and loops that make Velcro work the way it does. In the same way, our ideas should have lots of memorable details – the hooks – that can grab the attention of our audience – who have tons of loops ready to be hooked on something new.
I loved the example of ‘Saddleback Sam’ used in the book. Saddleback Sam is the idea of the average person a particular church is trying to reach. He has a lot of details about him – from the color of his skin and the amount of money he makes to the number of kids he has and his age – that help him to stick with the church staff and members. Everyone in this church knows their primary audience is Sam, and just like Southwest Airlines, they will make decisions based on what they think Sam would respond positively to.
This idea is like gold for advertising copywriting studies. Picturing in your mind a detailed picture of the person you want your ad/campaign/company to reach and making decisions based on that idea is a core idea that often goes overlooked. For my church, I haven’t figured out exactly who our Saddleback Sam is, though through our social media posts I have tried to shape them to be both informative and interesting to the older folks in the church as well and relevant and fun for the young audience I hope to reach. I have gotten this idea through growing up in the church and seeing the type of people most likely to interact with what’s going on online. While sometimes this can be hard since a detailed picture of Sam has not yet been established, it gives me a goal to work toward as I shape my content for Sam’s desires.
Following this, the book talks about how to tap into people’s emotions. Many people are naturally a little self-serving, meaning they like when advertisements, products, authority figures, and just about anything else apply to them, specifically. The book talks about using the word ‘you’ a lot in your copy in order to pull the reader into your brand and make them feel like they play a role in something big. This is something popular across social media, as many posts, tweets, and videos seem to interact as though the audience were in the room with the author.
Another thing the book discussed that I found particularly interesting was the study of how people view other people’s needs. While I have heard of Maslow and his hierarchy many times, the book had an interesting take as it talked about how we view others lower on the pyramid than ourselves. For example, while we might think that we should be looking at books on advanced calculus and yoga in order to reach self-actualization and enlarge our egos, we see other people as needing some of the basics like food and shelter, even though they might, in reality, be doing better than ourselves. This chapter also talked about overcoming the ‘Curse of Knowledge,’ which is the idea that once you know about something it becomes nearly impossible to imagine not knowing about it. A simple solution to this? Think like my three-year-old nephew and keep asking “Why?” to every single statement.
I am going to post this announcement video on Facebook and Twitter. Why? So the church members can have easy access and see the announcements. Why? So that they may be informed about upcoming events. Why? In the hopes that they might desire to get involved. Why? Because if they get involved, that, in turn, will bring more people, and the more helpers, the better! If you think like my nephew, ideas become easy to break down into small, manageable chunks. After reading this book, I have a mental conversation like this with every informative graphic or video I make, because I want to mentally see what the point is before I just post things to post them.
Lastly, the book details stories and how a well-crafted one can stick well with audiences. After all, there’s a reason why the story of the Good Samaritan is better known than the Beatitudes. People are able to recount stories that they hear much better than statistics and statements as our brains are wired to think of things as they would really happen, and the telling of stories taps into that.
This is the part of the paper where I reveal that even though I took a few notes while reading the book, I haven’t looked back at them once in order to write this paper. Not to remember the ‘SUCCES’ acronym – though I may have gotten the C’s mixed up – not to remember a story they told, and not to remember a single thing they told me to write down or otherwise remember. While I have a pretty good memory, this would still be an impressive feat if this book was full of nothing but statistics and facts. Luckily for me, it wasn’t. This book was riddled with rich stories of nurses saving the lives of babies, college students losing weight by eating Subway, students told if they have dark eyes they are better than the other students, commercials that have sudden car crashes, and dozens of more stories, too numerous to write out but memorable enough for me to know without having to look at notes.
This is another step I think is so crucial for copywriters, as people forget numbers and facts quickly, but who can forget the Budweiser Clydesdales running with that infamous wagon, or the old ladies asking, “Where’s the Beef?” or even the cute cartoon characters warning us to be safe around trains while singing about the dumbest ways to die? (In fact, the last one always gets that little jingle stuck in my head, which believe it or not follows all of the SUCCESses.) These stories stay with us, even if not always consciously. I love reminding people of old viral YouTube videos or other things that had fifteen seconds of fame and watching their faces light up with the memory of a story that had been long tucked away and makes them laugh just to think about it again. This is the power of a sticky story that advertisers should try to tap into.
In conclusion, copywriting is hard work. It is difficult to be creative and original, coming up with head-spinning ideas that have never been thought of before. Making advertisements for a specific company can often put severe restraints on creativity as well, and the job can seem daunting for students or other people new to the field. Luckily, as explained in this book, it is not impossible to get people to hang on to an idea. While some companies, unfortunately, find themselves in the position where the press surrounding them is ‘bad press,’ many companies have been able to make themselves, or at least some part of their brand, iconic because of a sticky idea.
When I think of Disney, I think of their logo, written in Walt’s handwriting and found across nearly everything the brand touches. When I think of State Farm, I think of Jake and his khakis as he talks to a jealous wife late at night. When I think of beer, I’m always reminded of the Bud Knight yelling “Dilly Dilly!” to the delight of the crowd around him as he toasts. These things at one point were each an individual idea pitched by a copywriter that may have been afraid to even speak up during the brainstorming session and has morphed into something that embodies their brand. I have said for a long time that personally I don’t care if people know my name so long as they know my work, and I think this book has helped me be able to develop my work into becoming something memorable. I have already used many of the lessons taught within its pages and look forward to many more years of crafting sticky ideas.
Amanda Roach 