The book is aimed at anyone who has an idea to convey and is trying to ensure that what they are trying to communicate sticks with their audience. Proverbs and folklores survive while corporate marketing material does not.
A famous urban legend in the United States is the Kidney heist. An attractive woman offered your friend’s friend a drink. He became unconscious soon afterward and woke up later to realize his kidney has been stolen. This urban legend is an interesting story worth sharing, and that’s why it sticks. Proper delivery is like this; it does not need repetition; people hear them once and remember them forever.
A non-profit found out that a single bag of popcorn, due to the presence of coconut oils, contains twice the recommended daily allowance of saturated fats. Telling the public that 37 gms of saturated fats are above the 20 gm daily limit was meaningless. People can’t relate to it, and it won’t form a story. So, the non-profit did a press conference and told that a single bag of popcorn is worse than a “bacon-and-eggs breakfast, big Mac and fries for lunch, and steak dinner with trimmings combined”. That was an immediate hit, sales of popcorn dropped, and eventually, theatres conceded to remove coconut oil from popcorn.
In the 1960s, a myth about contaminated candies given to children during holidays begins to spread. Parents were scared, and states passed laws. When the researcher did the study, they found precisely two cases of candy contamination, both by family members.
Kennedy’s “Putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade” fits all the criteria. “Becoming an international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives” means nothing. Sadly that’s how modern days CEO speak. While many of the above ideas are apparent, we end up ignoring these due to the curse of knowledge.
In Tapper vs. Listener experiment, one person taps a given famous song on a listener’s hand. The tapper thought 50% of the listeners would guess the song correctly; only 2.5% did. That’s the knowledge gap we encounter when conveying our ideas.
The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the more it gets stickier.
US army moved from passing the actual commanding order to the commander’s intent (CI). The CI prescribes the core idea that has to be done, not how it has to be done. CI is good enough to deal with unpredictable situational changes.
Focus on one core idea. The information should be in decreasing order of importance as one reads further. For the 1992 elections, Clinton used “It’s the economy, stupid” as the lead. To avoid burying the lead, other essential things like balancing the budget were forcefully left out.
Extraneous information, uncertainty, and choices impact our behavior. For example, in a study, only 20% of students chose to study over a once-in-a-lifetime lecture. But when a third choice to go watch a foreign film was added, 40% chose to study. The students chose a less enjoyable decision of studying as opposed to spending time choosing between the other two alternatives.
An accurate but inaccessible message like “maximizing shareholder value” is useless. Southwest’s “The low-cost airline” is an actionable message which can be used to make decisions.
The Daily Record, a local newspaper of Raleigh, has an intense focus on “names, names, and names” around anything related to locals. That’s why it enjoys a strong readership. Most other local newspapers, in practice, pay lip service to the idea of local news. Proverbs are passed around for generations since they are simple to learn, for example, “a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.” Palm Pilot won the market since it tried to do a few things well. As opposed to other PDAs that were trying to stuff too much the functionality.
Good analogies are generative. Disney calls its employees cast members. They are on stage when they are in front of the public. Even a Disney street cleaner is a performer. One can easily guess that since they are performing in front of people, they are expected to take breaks in private. Compared to this, Subway’s Sandwich artist is a flawed analogy. The job does not have much individual expression, and therefore, calling them artists does not help them define any aspect of their job.
An advertisement for a new minivan, the whole family, is inside it and enjoying it, then suddenly an accident happens at an intersection. The ad was about the importance of car seat belts. It does the job well of communicating its core message. Outpost.com, an online computer part seller, did a super bowl advertisement where wolves attack marching band members. It had an element of surprise but has no core message.
Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When we are angry, we think we are right. We remain curious as long as we believe there are gaps in our knowledge; the way to maintain someone’s attention is to open a gap before closing an existing one. In a teaching setting, one great way to maintain curiosity is to ask a question, and then make people publicly guess the answer to it, thereon, eventually, revealing the mystery at the end.
Masaru Ibuka, Sony’s chief technologist in the 1950s, motivated its engineer to build “pocket-sized radios” using the newly licensed transistor technology. Till then, Radio was a piece of furniture. It took a long while before Radios became pocket-sized, but the surprising and concrete vision kept engineers motivated.
A concrete idea hooks into our existing notions and is easy to memorize. For example, Pomelo is an extra-large grapefruit. That’s one reason why folklores like “grapes are sour” are so vivid and concrete. They might have had abstract details that got stripped over time.
We fall for abstractness because of the expertise trap. A novice perceives a concrete detail as a concrete detail. Expert perceives it as symbols of patterns and insights; they have learned over the years. And that’s the Curse of Knowledge. A significant advantage of concreteness is that it makes coordination easy across different teams. “A plane which can fly from New York to Miami non-stop” is concrete, but “the best passenger airplane in the world” is not. Concrete exercises are easier, “Write a list of all white things you can think of” is hard, and “Write a list of all white things on your refrigerator” is easy. James Grant, director of UNICEF, would put a packet of salt and sugar, the ORS ingredients, on the table in front of a Prime Minister and say that this costs less than a cup of tea and can save millions of lives in their country. The trick worked.
Good source of building credibility
Our analytical brain performs differently than the emotional one. Numbers and facts trigger the former, and stories trigger the latter. There are two major appeals - appeals to self-interest (what’s in it for me?) and appeal to identity (what would be a person with an identity similar to me do?). Identity rules over self-interest, especially in politics, where people vote based on the group they identify with most. Don’t mess with Texas anti-litter campaign that directly appealed to the identity of Bubbas and significantly reduced the roadside litter.
We love stories for the entertainment they provide. There are three types of story plots - challenge, connection, and creativity plot.
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