Made to Stick

2007 April 14

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Being a big fan of duct tape, I couldn't resist picking up Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath with its clever embossed image of my favorite adhesive technology. The premise of the book is that there are certain characteristics of ideas that become "sticky" in the minds of consumers: simplicity, unexpectedness ( law5), concreteness, credibility ( law8), emotion ( law7), and stories. I enjoyed their treatise on simplicity where they defined the equation of simplicity = core + compact. Their definition certainly embodies their own principle.