Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip & Dan Heath

How do we make our ideas resonate, especially for the long-term, or to spur action? Marketers wrestle with this conundrum on a daily basis and if they are successful in their careers, they must have found something that works for their particular strategies, audiences, resources, and goals. But how do you teach others a framework that could transcend those conditions? Is there any combination of elements that will yield a “sticky” idea more often than not? Made to Stick is broken out into six concepts that, when integrated harmoniously, yield “sticky” ideas.

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​The book is a testament unto itself – if this book can make these ideas stick, then clearly the authors were onto something! Walking step-by-step through the six principles – simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories – this book provides a framework anyone can use in any situation to help their messages resonate. Whether you are marketing a product, pitching a concept, persuading a friend, writing an article, devising a strategy, or presenting a project, or any number of other applications, the SUCCESs approach can provide you with a foundation on which to build. At the very least, you will walk away with a new perspective you can employ when needed. These concepts won’t always yield foolproof results, but for the most part, we would all agree that we can try to say something in a more concise manner and make our abstract ideas more concrete and vivid in order  for the audience to understand, agree, and remember our ideas. The goal is to relate your idea to someone’s perceptions clearly enough to appeal to them as effectively as possible; in a beautiful tie-back to Storyhaven, the main piece of advice Made to Stick offers is that in order to deliver a powerful messages that is most likely to resonate with your audience, you should employ simple, concrete, surprising, credible, emotional stories.