Evaluating Advertising Creative - Does it Stick?: Homework Assignment #6
Book Reviews
Book Review Editor: Preston G. Smith, CMC
Books reviewed in this issue:
’ Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
’ Think, Play, Do: Technology, Innovation, and Organization
’ Results without Authority: Controlling a Project When the Team Doesn’t Report to You
’ The Pursuit of New Product Development: The Business Development Process
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Chip Heath and Dan Heath. New York: Random House, 2007. 291þx pages. US$24.95.
Practitioners working in the innovation front end need to read Made to Stick at least twice. Read the book once for pure pleasure with a highlighter nearby. Read it a second time when you are getting your latest product idea ready to run the investment-approval gauntlet for money, people, and time. Applying the insights and nuggets of wisdom delivered by this book will help people understand your idea, care about your idea, and act on it.
By stick the authors mean that sticky ideas are understood, remembered, and thus have a lasting impact. The authors’ discussions of practical commu- nication rest on a foundation of scholarly research. The Notes section at the book’s end collects the ref- erences (pp. 259–276). In a welcome touch, Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s comments on many of the references bring to life what could have been just a dry listing. Also in the back of the book is ‘‘The Easy Reference Guide,’’ comprising key thoughts and es- sential take-aways from each chapter (pp. 253–257). Scattered throughout the book are sidebars to the text, ‘‘Idea Clinics,’’ with before and after examples showing how to make an idea stickier.
Students in Chip Heath’s Organizational Behavior Course 368 at Stanford Graduate School of Business helped test and refine the book’s framework. His coauthor and brother, Dan Heath, is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education—the custom executive education practice of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
In the introduction, the Heaths describe how they discovered the book’s content by pouring over hun- dreds of sticky ideas. They found six principles always at work when building a sticky idea: simplicity, un- expectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories. Each principle serves as title of the six chap- ters that follow.
They also discovered an arch villain, the Curse of Knowledge: ‘‘But wait a minute. We claim that using these principles is easy. And most of them do seem relatively commonsensical. So why aren’t we deluged with brilliantly designed sticky ideas? Why is our life filled with more process memos than proverbs? Sadly, there is a villain in our story. The villain is a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using these principles. It’s called the Curse of Knowledge’’ (p. 19).
In the innovation front end, the Curse of Knowl- edge often surfaces. The innovator knows more about this product idea than anybody else. Given this knowledge it is hard for the innovator to imagine what it is like not to know it. Because the innovators cannot readily recreate others’ not-knowing state of mind, it is tough for most innovators to share their knowledge with others. The innovators’ knowledge has ‘‘cursed’’ the innovators’ task of communicating their knowledge to executives and colleagues.
The authors suggest you try the following experi- ment to make obvious the power of the Curse of Knowledge. Give a list of 25 well-known songs such as ‘‘Happy Birthday’’ or the ‘‘The Star-Spangled Ban- ner’’ to a musically inclined friend—who is assigned to be the ‘‘tapper.’’ The tapper picks out a song and
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taps out its rhythm to you—the ‘‘listener’’—by knocking on a table. Before you guess the name of the song ask the tapper to predict the odds you will guess correctly.
This simple game was the foundation of a Stanford University Ph.D. dissertation (Newton, 1990). New- ton found that the listener’s job—your job in the game—is not straightforward. Over the course of Newton’s research 120 songs were tapped out. Lis- teners guessed only 3 out of the 120. Tappers esti- mated before the game that at least 50 percent of the listeners would correctly identify the song compared with a true accuracy rate of 3 percent.
What accounts for this striking overestimation by the tappers? Tappers can ‘‘hear’’ the tune, words to the song, and even the orchestration. This makes it impossible for them to imagine what it is like to lack knowledge of the tune, the words, and the orchestra- tion. On the other hand, listeners are limited to a se- ries of taps not knowing whether the silences between the taps are sustained notes or musical ‘‘rests’’ be- tween notes.
Innovators should not unlearn the knowledge they already have about their product idea. However, they can use the checklist of the authors’ six principles to tailor their ideas so other people can recognize their idea’s ‘‘melody’’ as clearly as the innovator ‘‘hears’’ it internally.
Discovering the core of an idea is the first of two steps in making an idea sticky: ‘‘Finding the core means stripping an idea down to its most critical es- sence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out su- perfluous and tangential elements. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea . . . . It’s about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine’’ (p. 28).
The authors deal with finding the core in the first chapter, titled ‘‘Simple.’’ They use examples drawn from the Army (‘‘the Commander’s Intent’’) and from start-ups such as Southwest Airlines (‘‘We are the low- fare airline’’). The Commander’s Intent is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order. It specifies the desired end state of the order: ‘‘ ‘My intent is to have Third Battalion on Hill 4305, to have the hill cleared of enemy, with only ineffective remnants remaining, so we can protect the flank of Third Brigade as they pass through the lines’ . . . Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leader’’ (p. 26).
The remaining chapters deal with sharing the core—ways to get the core idea to stick with others. Unexpected is the second characteristic of sticky ideas. It focuses on two questions: How do I get people’s attention? And how do I keep it?
Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention. However, the sur- prise needs to be applicable to the core idea, or else it is a worthless gimmick. Holding people’s attention once they are surprised involves creating a mystery to produce curiosity.
Concrete, the third characteristic, helps people un- derstand and remember. Concrete language is a key ingredient of a sticky idea. It helps newcomers under- stand concepts. Concrete language also helps people find a common ground for coordination.
For example, in the innovation front end you have technologists, marketers, engineers, and executive de- cision makers all wanting to take in the innovator’s expert knowledge. However, the difference between the expert and these newcomers to the idea is the ability to think abstractly about the idea. The inno- vator sees the idea’s details as symbols of patterns the innovator has learned through longer association with the idea than the newcomers. And the Curse of Knowledge kicks in because the innovator sees at a higher level of insight and often talks about these abstract insights much to the befuddlement of the listeners.
Credible, the fourth characteristic, helps people be- lieve. To make an idea sticky, the idea needs vivid, truthful, core details. The Idea Clinic sidebar in this chapter asks the question, Which of these animals is more likely to kill you: a shark or a deer? The answer is, A deer is 300 times more likely to kill you (via a collision with your car). The idea taps hard statistics from the Florida Museum of Natural History for credibility. It is also simple, unexpected, concrete, and emotional.
Emotional is the fifth characteristic of stickiness. To make an idea sticky, make people care. The Heaths’ observation, and Idea Clinic teaching in this chapter, is that empathy emerges from the particular rather than the pattern. We make people care about our ideas by associating them with things people already care about. We avoid the Curse of Knowledge by not assuming that others care at the same level we do.
Stories, the last characteristic, get people to act. A story, the Creativity plot, about Ingersoll-Rand’s overcoming slowness in bringing a new product to market illustrates the use of stories. The Creativity
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BOOK REVIEWS
plot reinforced the Ingersoll-Rand team’s new culture. Its underlying message was, ‘‘We still need to get the right data to make decisions. We just need to do it a lot quicker’’ (p. 230). The team came up with a simple but effective test that substantially cut the time to turn out essential data. Inspirational stories have two other key plots: Challenge (overcoming obstacles) and Con- nection (developing a relationship that bridges gaps).
Most stories contain unexpected, concrete, credi- ble, and emotional characteristics from the checklist of six principles. The most difficult characteristic to build into stories is keeping them simple. Again, it’s the arch-villain, the Curse of Knowledge, that makes it difficult to keep stories simple. The arch-villain strikes most often when the story does not reflect the core message. The speaker is ‘‘tapping,’’ but the audience cannot hear the same tune the speaker’s mind hears.
The Heaths present their book’s subject with skill and authority. It is a first-class and highly practical account of how one presents ideas so they are accept- ed by others.
Reference
Newton, Elizabeth (1990). Overconfidence in the Communication of In- tent: Heard and Unheard Melodies, Ph.D. diss., Stanford Universi- ty, Stanford, CA.
George Castellion SSC Associates
Think, Play, Do: Technology, Innovation, and Organization Mark Dodgson, David Gann, and Amon Salter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 254þxiv pages. US$49.95.
Every once in a while a book comes along that does a good job of pulling a varied array of elements into a coherent, useful whole. That is the accomplishment of this book, which, despite the simplicity of its title, deals with the complexity of the product innovation process as it applies across a broad spectrum of pro- jects.
As defined by the authors, these elements fall into three groups:
(1) Information and communication technology (ICT), described as ‘‘an enabling technology for innovation’’ (p. 7)
(2) Operations and manufacturing technology (OMT), concerned with the implementation of innovation
(3) Innovation technology (IvT), which is the tech- nology for creating innovation
The application of the third of these groups is the primary focus of this book. IvT includes simulation and modeling tools, virtual reality, data mining, and rapid prototyping.
The aim of IvT is to facilitate thinking, playing, and doing (TPD) as a different and superior approach to the innovation process. Instead of dividing that process into discrete functions, for example, research and development (R&D) and engineering, TPD re- sults in more fluid boundaries between them. The au- thors argue persuasively, using their research on a wide variety of in-depth examples of the application of IvT, that its use ‘‘has the potential to alter radically the ways in which innovation occurs, and to amelio- rate many of the uncertainties associated with it, bringing greater predictability and direction to the process’’ (p. 3).
These advantages are illustrated in the widely var- ied examples that were the subject of the authors’ research. It should be noted, however, that in the opinion of this reviewer, TPD is not so much a re- placement for the multiple stages usually thought of as defining the innovation process as it is a superior approach to their consideration and execution.
At its essence, the book consists of three parts. The first three chapters provide the background for un- derstanding TPD. Chapter 1, ‘‘Innovation Technolo- gy,’’ establishes the basis of the TPD approach to innovation. The material in Chapter 2, ‘‘Understand- ing Innovation,’’ will be familiar to those working in the product innovation area.
Chapter 3, ‘‘Using Innovation Technology,’’ illus- trates the value of IvT for innovation using two very different examples: Procter & Gamble and Arup, an international engineering and design services compa- ny. Arup Fire division, for example, uses simulation and modeling techniques to design buildings for speedy emergency evacuations. For one tall London building, Arup Fire concluded that, contrary to ex- pectations, evacuation using elevators would be al- most twice as fast as using stairways (p. 75).
Chapters 4–6 constitute the heart of the book, with a chapter devoted to ‘‘Think,’’ ‘‘Play,’’ and ‘‘Do,’’ respectively. Thus, Chapter 4 examines the extent to which IvT technology has provided new aids to
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