Made to Stick (Cont’d)

I said it before, this is a great book and I still think so now I finished reading it. Just like with Naked Conversations a couple of months ago, I first didn’t want to write too much about it since you just have to read it, so I’ll keep it short. Every time I read a book like this, I’ll put a small piece of paper between the pages that I want to re-read later on. Normally I’ll end up with about 3-5 pages ‘bookmarked’ this way, but not this time… the book is full of little pieces of paper (a bit like this). Here’s why.

The whole book is built around SUCCES, where SUCCES is an acronym for Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story, a sort of checklist for creating a idea that sticks. To explain this, Dan & Chip use a whole lot of concrete examples throughout the book that help you understand what they’re talking about. Read on about the Curse of Knowledge in Tappers and Listeners, the definition of a watermelon, the Sinatra test, … and much more interesting stuff.

” Memory is not like a single filing cabinet. It is more like Velcro. If you look at the two sides of Velcro material, you’ll see that one is covered with thousands of tiny hooks and the other is covered with thousands of tiny loops. When you press the two sides together, a huge number of hooks get snagged inside the loops, and that’s what causes Velcro to seal. Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory. Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain. A new credit card number has one, if it’s lucky.”

Today I notice that when I’m working on a new strategy or creative idea, I remember the key elements in SUCCES and I cross-check to see if I got enough elements in my idea to make it work. The same counts for when I see work/campaigns of others that I like, I’ll go over the list to see why that is indeed a good idea.

I definitely recommend it to everyone, and not just everyone in marketing. This works when you are in education as well as when you are in advertising. Let me know what you think of it.