PR Hint of the Month - January 2008: Making Your Library's Ideas Stick

PR Hint of the Month - January 2008: Making Your Library's Ideas Stick

The following tip for marketing has been blatantly, unabashedly lifted from Chip and Dan Heath's book, "Made To Stick." http://www.madetostick.com/

This book will help you make your ideas stick. By "stick," we mean that your ideas are understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact - they change your audience's opinions or behavior.

Stories that sticks. We understand it, we remember it, and we can retell it later. And if we believe it's true, it might change our behavior permanently.

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas?

Given the importance of making ideas stick, it's surprising how little attention is paid to the subject. When we get advice on communicating, it often concerns our delivery: "Stand up straight, make eye contact, use appropriate hand gestures. Practice, practice, practice (but don't sound canned)." Sometimes we get advice about structure: "Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em. Tell 'em, then tell 'em what you told 'em." Or "Start by getting their attention - tell a joke or a story."

Another genre concerns knowing your audience: "Know what your listeners care about, so you can tailor your communication to them." And, finally, there's the most common refrain in the realm of communication advice: Use repetition, repetition, repetition.

All of this advice has obvious merit, except, perhaps, for the emphasis on repetition. (If you have to tell someone the same thing ten times, the idea probably wasn't very well designed. No urban legend has to be repeated ten times.) But this set of advice has one glaring shortcoming: It doesn't help Art Silverman as he tries to figure out the best way to explain that movie popcorn is really unhealthful.

Silverman no doubt knows that he should make eye contact and practice. But what message is he supposed to practice? He knows his audience - they're people who like popcorn and don't realize how unhealthy it is. So what message does he share with them? Complicating matters, Silverman knew that he wouldn't have the luxury of repetition - he had only one shot to make the media care about his story.
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The authors of Made To Stick, Chip and Dan Heath adopted the "what sticks" terminology from one of their favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell. In 2000, Gladwell's book called The Tipping Point examined the forces that cause social phenomena to "tip," or make the leap from small groups to big groups, the way contagious diseases spread rapidly once they infect a certain critical mass of people. The middle section of the book, "The Stickiness Factor," argues that innovations are more likely to tip when they're sticky.

Six Principles of Sticky Ideas

There is no "formula" for a sticky idea. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed.

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
Saying something short is not the mission - sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
We need to violate people's expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day's worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise - an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus - to grab people's attention. But surprise doesn't last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.

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. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images - ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors - because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. Concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
When we're trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. 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. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. 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.

There you have it, the six principles of successful ideas. No special expertise is needed to apply these principles. There are no licensed stickologists. Moreover, many of the principles have a commonsense ring to them: Didn't most of us already have the intuition that we should "be simple" and "use stories"? It's not as though there's a powerful constituency for overcomplicated, lifeless prose. But wait a minute. We claim that using these principles is easy. And most of them do seem relatively commonsensical. So why aren't we deluged with brilliantly designed sticky ideas? Why is our life filled with more process memos than proverbs?

Sadly, there is a villain in this story. The villain is a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using these principles. It's called the Curse of Knowledge. To read more, see http://www.madetostick.com/thebook/excerpts.php

Happy New Year! May 2008 be a sticky year for you all!

Sticking to the story,
Heidi Sue, on behalf of your friendly MLA PR & Marketing Committee

Heidi Sue Adams, MS, AHIP Medical Librarian
Kalispell Regional Medical Center - Medical Library