Made to Stick

ple’s attention? And, just as crucially, How do I keep it? We can’t suc-
ceed if our messages don’t break through the clutter to get people’s
attention. Furthermore, our messages are usually complex enough
that we won’t succeed if we can’t keep people’s attention.
To understand the answers to these two questions, we have to un-
derstand two essential emotions—surprise and interest—that are
commonly provoked by naturally sticky ideas.
•
Surprise gets our attention. Some naturally sticky ideas pro-
pose surprising “facts”: The Great Wall of China is the
only man-made structure visible from space! You use only
10 percent of your brain! You should drink eight glasses of
water a day! Urban legends frequently contain surprising
plot twists.
•
Interest keeps our attention. There are classes of sticky ideas
that maintain our interest over time. Conspiracy theories
keep people ravenously collecting new information. Gossip
keeps us coming back to our friends for developments.
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Naturally sticky ideas are frequently unexpected. If we can make
our ideas more unexpected, they will be stickier. But can you generate
“unexpectedness”? Isn’t “planned unexpectedness” an oxymoron?
GETTING PEOPLE’S ATTENTION
N o   O n e   E v e r   D o e s
The television commercial for the new Enclave minivan opens with
the Enclave sitting in front of a park. A boy holding a football helmet
climbs into the minivan, followed by his two younger sisters. “Intro-
ducing the all-new Enclave,” begins a woman’s voice-over. Dad is be-
hind the wheel and Mom is in the passenger seat. Cup holders are
everywhere. Dad starts the car and pulls away from the curb. “It’s a
minivan to the max.”
The minivan cruises slowly through suburban streets. “With fea-
tures like remote-controlled sliding rear doors, 150 cable channels, a
full sky-view roof, temperature-controlled cup holders, and the six-
point navigation system . . . It’s the minivan for families on the go.”
The Enclave pulls to a stop at an intersection. The camera zooms
in on the boy, gazing out a side window that reflects giant, leafy trees.
Dad pulls into the intersection.
That’s when it happens.
A speeding car barrels into the intersection and broadsides the
minivan. There is a terrifying collision, with metal buckling and an
explosion of broken glass.
The screen fades to black, and a message appears: “Didn’t see that
coming?”
The question fades and is replaced by a statement: “No one ever
does.”
With the sound of a stuck horn blaring in the background, a few
final words flash across the screen: “Buckle up . . . Always.”
There is no Enclave minivan. This ad was created by the Ad
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M A D E   T O   S T I C K

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Council. (The Enclave spot was sponsored by the U.S. Department
of Transportation.) The Ad Council, founded in 1942, has launched
many successful campaigns, from the World War II–era “Loose Lips
Sink Ships” to the more recent “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive
Drunk.” The Enclave ad, like many other Council ads, capitalizes on
the second characteristic of sticky ideas: Unexpectedness.
The Enclave ad is unexpected because it violates our schema for
car commercials. We know how car commercials are supposed to be-
have. Pickups climb mountains of boulders. Sports cars zip along va-
cant curvy roads. SUVs carry yuppies through forests to waterfalls.
And minivans deliver kids to soccer practice. No one dies, ever.
The ad is unexpected in a second way: It violates our schema of
real-life neighborhood trips. We take thousands of trips in our neigh-
borhoods, and the vast majority of them end safely. The commercial
reminds us that accidents are inherently unexpected—we ought to
buckle up, just in case.
Our schemas are like guessing machines. Schemas help us pre-
dict what will happen and, consequently, how we should make deci-
sions. The Enclave asks, “Didn’t see that coming?” No, we didn’t.
Our guessing machines failed, which caused us to be surprised.
Emotions are elegantly tuned to help us deal with critical situa-
tions. They prepare us for different ways of acting and thinking.
We’ve all heard that anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to
flee. The linkages between emotion and behavior can be more sub-
tle, though. For instance, a secondary effect of being angry, which
was recently discovered by researchers, is that we become more cer-
tain of our judgments. When we’re angry, we know we’re right, as
anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.
So if emotions have biological purposes, then what is the biologi-
cal purpose of surprise? Surprise jolts us to attention. Surprise is trig-
gered when our schemas fail, and it prepares us to understand why
the failure occurred. When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs
our attention so that we can repair them for the future.
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T h e   S u r p r i s e   B r o w
Surprise is associated with a facial expression that is consistent across
cultures. In a book called Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman and Wal-
lace Friesen coined a term, “the surprise brow,” to describe the dis-
tinctive facial expression of surprise: “The eyebrows appear curved
and high. . . . The skin below the brow has been stretched by the lift-
ing of the brow, and is more visible than usual.”
When our brows go up, it widens our eyes and gives us a broader
field of vision—the surprise brow is our body’s way of forcing us to see
more. We may also do a double take to make sure that we saw what
we thought we saw. By way of contrast, when we’re angry our eyes
narrow so that we can focus on a known problem. In addition to mak-
ing our eyebrows rise, surprise causes our jaws to drop and our
mouths to gape. We’re struck momentarily speechless. Our bodies
temporarily stop moving and our muscles go slack. It’s as though our
bodies want to ensure that we’re not talking or moving when we
ought to be taking in new information.
So surprise acts as a kind of emergency override when we confront
something unexpected and our guessing machines fail. Things come
to a halt, ongoing activities are interrupted, our attention focuses in-
voluntarily on the event that surprised us. When a minivan com-
mercial ends in a bloodcurdling crash, we stop and wonder, What is