Made to Stick
by Chip Heath
Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like to not know it.
Why read it
Why do some ideas, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and proverbs, survive and spread effortlessly, while important truths, carefully argued and backed by data, vanish without a trace?
Chip and Dan Heath investigate what makes ideas memorable and identify six shared traits of sticky messages, captured in the acronym SUCCES: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Story. Using cases from marketing, teaching, and folklore, they show how anyone can deliberately engineer ideas that lodge in the mind and change behavior.
Brothers Chip Heath, a Stanford business professor, and Dan Heath, a Duke fellow, published Made to Stick in 2007. It became a New York Times bestseller and a modern classic of business communication, building on ideas about memorable messaging and launching the pair's series of collaborative books.
- 01
The SUCCES checklist
The takeaway is a six-part template, Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story, for stress-testing any message.
- 02
The Curse of Knowledge
Experts fail to communicate because they cannot imagine not knowing what they know, the core barrier to stickiness.
- 03
Find the core
Stripping an idea to its single most important element is the first and hardest discipline of clear communication.
- 04
Stories as simulation
A well-chosen story functions as mental rehearsal, making abstract ideas actionable and memorable.
The Subway sandwich campaign built around Jared, whose concrete personal weight-loss story sold health more powerfully than statistics.
The urban legend of the stolen kidney, dissected to show exactly which sticky traits make such tales impossible to forget.
