Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

The introduction compares the impact of the Kidney Heist tale, an urban legend, with a dense paper about strategies of community building for an unnamed nonprofit organization. In the Kidney Heist, a woman spikes the drink of an unsuspecting businessman at a bar. The man wakes up in an icy bathtub and learns that a group of organ thieves has harvested one of his kidneys. The Kidney Heist is without a doubt more memorable than the dense paper.

Chip and Dan Heath argue that all ideas can be made just as interesting. Even ideas that are not naturally interesting can be conveyed in a way that grabs attention. In “The Truth About Movie Popcorn,” when ad man Art Silverman had to inform the public that a medium serving of movie popcorn contains more than the recommended daily intake of saturated fats, he designed a campaign around a visual comparison: One medium serving of popcorn contains “more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings” combined (7). The campaign was a success—Silverman’s idea had a lasting impact on public behavior.

In “What Led to Made to Stick,” the authors describe compiling and analyzing the common components in all sticky ideas after being inspired by Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s work, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000), which posits that certain social phenomena—such as epidemics—spread exponentially faster when they reach a “tipping point.