Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Chip Heath · ★★★★☆ · 291 pages · 2006
The principles of Made to Stick are the following:
Simplicity: How can you make what you are selling or talking about as simple as possible to understand. Have to distil ideas to their core without becoming meaningless. An example they use is for Southwest with their unofficial motto, "The Low-Cost Airline."
Unexpectedness: This seems to come more from Sun Tzu. Essentially, a surprise which captures the people you are trying to reach by surprise. By doing something unexpected that they are not expecting you are attracting their attention.
Concreteness: Have something concrete that people remember. Something visual, something that can focus people's attention on something. Having something concrete helps people work with a mental model, and it allows them to build upon it.
Credibility: Have to use statistics with things that people understand. A good example referenced in the book is a workplace as a soccer team. Is everyone aiming at the same goal?
Emotional: Use association, self-interest and appeal to their identity. Something that affects all of those allows a person to care more as it hits their emotional nerve.
Stories: A story sells a lot more than spouting out a bunch of statistics. We are born for stories and pass around stories. Even when we talk at the watercooler, we tell stories to each other. And this is the same if you want an idea to stick to tell a story. Example, how Jared from Subway was a thing. It was a story people could relate to.
Overall a good book, it did drag at some points and could have been condensed a bit but otherwise a good read.