Wichita Marketing Notes: Excerpts from “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

I’m not ordinarily one to quote other people’s work, but some of the ideas in this book are blowing my mind. These principles apply to everything we do in our Wichita marketing efforts. The book is also very well written, which is a compliment I don’t pay lightly.

Six Principles of Sticky Ideas
(Excerpted with the authors’ permission from “Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die,” copyright 2007 by Chip Heath and Dan Heath)

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, "If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won't remember any." To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people's expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. But surprise doesn't last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. We can engage people's curiosity over a long period of time by systematically "opening gaps" in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don't enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a "try before you buy" philosophy for the world of ideas.

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it's difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it's easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

To summarize, here's our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs. This is sheer coincidence, of course. (Okay, we admit, SUCCESs is a little corny. We could have changed "Simple" to "Core" and reordered a few letters. But, you have to admit, CCUCES is less memorable.)

On behalf of all Wichita marketing professionals, thanks, Chip and Dan.
--Wynn Ponder

See other Wichita marketing articles.

Wichita marketing notes: A news release check list

There are two kinds of news releases. One, although commonly called a news release, is actually an article. These are sent to trade journals and other content-hungry magazines who plan to flow your text into their publications with minimal editing. If you’re writing this kind of “news release,” don’t use the suggestions below. Instead, write a good article. (We’ll cover that in a later blog entry.)

The other—more common—type of news release is sent to journalists who will author the actual article. Here are a few tips for piquing their interest:

1. Your topic has to be newsworthy. Find the news story within your marketing story, an angle that will hook journalists. Their job is not to sell your product or company, but to sell issues of their publications. If there’s no actual news story in what you have to say, don’t waste your time creating a news release.

2. Find the hook. To be newsworthy, your release should be relevant in a context larger than your organization. A story about how you’ve hired 20 new employees is nice for you, but it’s more newsworthy when placed in the context of high unemployment rates in your area. Human interest hooks are also effective; people love reading about people.

3. Put the most important information at the beginning. The first paragraph should give a complete overview of “who, what, when, where and why.” The second paragraph should expand on the first. The following paragraphs should fill in peripheral information in descending order of importance.

4. Keep paragraphs short and scannable.

5. Use quotations to humanize the release and improve its readability. Place every quotation in its own paragraph, even if it’s only one sentence long.

6. Use minimal adjectives and no flowery language. Journalists want the facts. They’ll do the job of turning the story into prose, should they decide to pick it up.

Here’s a good format to use for news releases.

See other Wichita marketing articles.

Wichita marketing notes: Get attention first

I’ve done a ton of technical advertising over the years, industrial, aircraft, software, you name it. I enjoy engineering-based products because nowhere does the art of creative persuasion call for greater talent than in the task of translating a technical feature into an attention-getting concept.

But nowhere is the value of high-concept advertising more difficult to convey than to an engineering-based client. Engineers, technicians and other data-driven people are usually so enamored of the technical facts surrounding their products that it’s difficult for them to step outside their own knowledge-sets and imagine what it’s like not to know what they know. Their intimate knowledge of the product is often their worst enemy from a marketing standpoint because they can’t imagine a target audience not being instantly fascinated by its technical elegance.

The truth is that, no matter how perfect a product or service is for a given target audience, you still have to pull them out of the hypnotic reverie called “real life,” in order to tell your story.

The formula is the same every time: 1) get attention, 2) identify a need, 3) fill the need and 4) ask for the order. The natural tendency of technical-minded people is to jump to step 3 because the manner in which their product can fill the need is where their brains live, day-in and day-out.

It’s our job as marketing professionals to help them understand the technical process of advertising. Just as a computer motherboard can’t be overhauled until you’ve disconnected the power and removed the access panel, so the human mind can’t be influenced until you’ve opened it with a provocative thought (the headline and visual) that demands further exploration (reading the copy). Only then can you “fill the need” in a way that will be mentally allowed by the target.

See other Wichita marketing articles.