Made to Stick

going on?
Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes
us pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking sears
unexpected events into our memories. Surprise gets our attention.
Sometimes the attention is fleeting, but in other cases surprise can
lead to enduring attention. Surprise can prompt us to hunt for under-
lying causes, to imagine other possibilities, to figure out how to avoid
surprises in the future.
Researchers who study conspiracy theories, for instance, have
noted that many of them arise when people are grappling with unex-
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pected events, such as when the young and attractive die suddenly.
There are conspiracy theories about the sudden deaths of JFK, Mari-
lyn Monroe, Elvis, and Kurt Cobain. There tends to be less conspira-
torial interest in the sudden deaths of ninety-year-olds.
Surprise makes us want to find an answer—to resolve the question
of why we were surprised—and big surprises call for big answers. If
we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the
power of big surprises.
Av o i d i n g   G i m m i c k r y
Going for a big surprise, though, can cause a big problem. It’s easy to
step over the line into gimmickry.
The late 1990s was the heyday of the dot-com bubble. Venture-
backed start-ups poured millions of dollars into advertising to estab-
lish their brands. With increasing amounts of money chasing a finite
amount of consumer attention, ads had to work harder and harder to
provoke surprise and interest.
During the Super Bowl of 2000, an ad ran that opened with a col-
lege marching band practicing on a football field. We’re shown close-
ups of the band members as they execute their precision movements.
Then we cut to the stadium tunnel, which leads out onto the field—
and suddenly a dozen ravenous wolves rush onto the field. Band
members scatter in terror as the wolves hunt them down and attack.
What was this advertisement for? We have no idea. There’s no
question that this ad was surprising and memorable. To this day, 
we remember the tastelessly comic image of the wolves chasing the
terrified band members. But because the surprise was utterly non-
germane to the message that needed to be communicated, it was
worthless. If the product being advertised had been “mauling-proof
band uniforms,” on the other hand, the ad could have been an award
winner.
In this sense, the wolves ad is the opposite of the Enclave ad. Both
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ads contain powerful surprises, but only the Enclave ad uses that sur-
prise to reinforce its core message. In Chapter 1 we discussed the im-
portance of finding the core in your ideas. Using surprise in the
service of a core message can be extremely powerful.
H e n s i o n   a n d   P h r a u g
Below is a list of four words. Read each one and take a second to de-
termine whether it’s a real English word.
HENSION
BARDLE
PHRAUG
TAYBL
According to Bruce Whittlesea and Lisa Williams, the researchers
who developed this task, “PHRAUG and TAYBL often cause raised
eyebrows, and an ‘Oh!’ reaction. HENSION and BARDLE often
cause a frown.”
PHRAUG and TAYBL cause the surprise brow because they look
unfamiliar but sound familiar. The “Oh!” reaction comes when we
realize that PHRAUG is just a funny way to spell FROG.
HENSION and BARDLE are more troubling. They seem oddly
familiar, because they borrow letter combinations from common
words. They have the look of SAT words—fancy vocabulary that we
should probably know but don’t. But HENSION and BARDLE are
made-up words. When we realize that we’ve been struggling to find a
nonexistent solution, we get frustrated.
HENSION and BARDLE provide an example of surprise without
insight. So far, we’ve talked a lot about the power of surprise, and how
surprise can make our ideas stickier. But although HENSION and
BARDLE are surprising, they aren’t sticky; they’re just frustrating.
What we see now is that surprise isn’t enough. We also need insight.
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To be surprising, an event can’t be predictable. Surprise is the op-
posite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-
dictable.” The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not
something you would have seen coming. PHRAUG is post-dictable,
but HENSION isn’t. Contrast the feeling you get from TV shows or
films, such as The Sixth Sense, that have great surprise endings—
endings that unite clues that you’ve been exposed to all along—with
the feeling you get from gimmicky, unforeseeable endings (“It was
all a dream”).
We started the chapter by pointing out that surprise happens
when our guessing machines fail. The emotion of surprise is de-
signed to focus our attention on the failure, so that we can improve
our guessing machines for the future. Then we drew a distinction be-
tween gimmicky surprise, like dot-com ads, and meaningful post-
dictable surprise.
Here is the bottom line for our everyday purposes: If you want
your ideas to be stickier, you’ve got to break someone’s guessing ma-
chine and then fix it. But in surprising people, in breaking their
guessing machines, how do we avoid gimmicky surprise, like the
wolves? The easiest way to avoid gimmicky surprise and ensure that
your unexpected ideas produce insight is to make sure you target an
aspect of your audience’s guessing machines that relates to your core
message. We’ve already seen a few examples of this strategy.
In Chapter 1, we discussed Hoover Adams, the newspaper pub-
lisher whose mantra is “Names, names, and names.” To most local
newspaper reporters, this mantra will seem like common sense. Cer-
tainly, their schemas of “good local news” involve community-focused
stories.
But that wasn’t Adams’s point. He had something much more rad-
ical in mind. So he broke their schema by saying, essentially, “If I
could, I’d publish pages from the phone book to get names. In fact, if
I could gather up enough names I’d hire more typesetters to lay out
more pages so they’d fit.” Suddenly the reporters realized that
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“Names, names, and names” was not consistent with their schemas.
Whereas their previous schema might have been “Try to emphasize
local angles when you can,” Adams had replaced that with “Names
come before everything else, even my own profitability.” That’s a
message that draws power from its unexpectedness.
Another example we discussed in Chapter 1 was Southwest Air-
lines’ proverb “THE low-cost airline.” Again, most Southwest staffers
and customers know that Southwest is a discount airline. In that con-
text, the proverb seems intuitive. It was only when Kelleher put teeth
in the proverb—refusing to offer chicken salad to customers even if
they really wanted it—that its meaning sank in. Before Kelleher, an
average staffer’s guessing machine might have predicted, “We want to
please our customers in a low-cost way.” After Kelleher, the guessing
machine was refined to “We will be THE low-cost airline, even if it
means intentionally disregarding some of our customers’ prefer-
ences.”
So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify
the central message you need to communicate—find the core; (2)
Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What
are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn’t it
already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a
way that breaks your audience’s guessing machines along the critical,
counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines
have failed, help them refine their machines.
Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages
sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the
other. And why shouldn’t they? If I already intuitively “get” what
you’re trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it?
The danger, of course, is that what sounds like common sense often
isn’t, as with the Hoover Adams and Southwest examples. It’s your
job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are
uncommon sense.
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T i r e   C h a i n s   a t   N o r d s t r o m
Nordstrom is a department store known for outstanding customer ser-
vice. That extra service comes at a price: Nordstrom can be an expen-
sive place to shop. Yet many people are willing to pay higher prices
precisely because Nordstrom makes shopping so much more pleasant.
For Nordstrom’s strategy to work, it must transform its frontline
employees into customer-service zealots. And they do not walk in the
door that way. Most people with service experience come from envi-
ronments where managers spend much of their energy trying to min-
imize labor costs. The prevailing schema of customer service might
be, roughly, “Get customers in and out the door as fast as possible,
and try to smile.”
Job applicants at Nordstrom will likely have years of experience
acting on this schema. But Nordstrom has a different philosophy:
Make customers happy even at the expense of efficiency. How does
Nordstrom break down one schema and replace it with another?
The company solves this problem, in part, through unexpected
stories. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in their book Built to Last, de-
scribe stories told at Nordstrom about unexpected service by employ-
ees, who are known within the firm as “Nordies”:
The Nordie who ironed a new shirt for a customer who needed it
for a meeting that afternoon;
the Nordie who cheerfully gift wrapped products a customer
bought at Macy’s;
the Nordie who warmed customers’ cars in winter while they
finished shopping;
the Nordie who made a last-minute delivery of party clothes to
a frantic hostess;
and even the Nordie who refunded money for a set of tire
chains—although Nordstrom doesn’t sell tire chains.
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You can imagine the surprise, if not shock, that these stories pro-
voke in new Nordstrom employees. “Wrap a gift from Macy’s! I don’t
get it. What’s in it for us?” These stories attack the unspoken assump-
tions of customer service, such as: Service stops at the door of the
store. Don’t waste your time on someone who’s not buying. Once you
close a sale, move on to the next prospect.
To new employees, the idea of wrapping a gift bought at a com-
petitor’s store is so absurd, so far outside the bounds of their existing
notion of “service,” that the story stops them in their tracks. Their
guessing machines have been broken. Their old “good service” guess-
ing machine would never have produced the idea of altruistic gift-
wrapping. The stories provide the first step toward replacing a new
employee’s schema of “good service” with the Nordstrom service
schema.
In this way, Nordstrom breaks through the complacency of com-
mon sense. Instead of spreading stories about “Nordies,” Nordstrom
could simply tell its employees that its mission is to provide “the best
customer service in the industry.” This statement may be true, but,
unfortunately, it sounds like something that JCPenney or Sears might
also tell its employees. To make a message stick, you’ve got to push it
beyond common sense to uncommon sense. “Great customer ser-
vice” is common sense. Warming customers’ cars in the winter is un-
common sense.
Note that these stories would be even more unexpected—and
even less commonsensical—if they were told about a 7-Eleven em-
ployee. “Yeah, I went in to get a pack of smokes and the counter clerk