Made to Stick

Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath: my summary and Queal brainstorming notes.

Simplicity

Simplicity means making the core intention clear, as in a commander telling a platoon to take a hill without prescribing each soldier’s position. The difficult work is choosing the most important idea, even when other ideas matter too. The aim is elegance and prioritisation rather than dumbing the message down. The Southwest Airlines example tests its promise, ‘We are THE low-fare airline’, by asking whether serving lunch fits that promise.

Start with the lead. A message that tries to say three things at once may leave people with none of them, while a clear priority reduces uncertainty in decisions. The notes cite a local newspaper’s repeated editorial aim, ‘Names, names, and names’, as its core message.

Step 1 is to define a core message; Step 2 is to communicate it. A simple message is both central and compact, even when considerable knowledge sits behind it. Proverbs work this way: “Better one bird in the hand than 10 in the air” condenses long experience into a short sentence. My mnemonic example was that JFK is easier to remember than KJF. Compactness is useful when it builds on something people already know.

Layering a simple idea can build complexity without overwhelming the audience. Familiar schemas provide a starting point: give enough information to be useful, then add more. This resembles the pyramid structure of a text. An analogy can do the same work; describing Alien as “Jaws on a spaceship” gives the audience a quick picture, while leaving room to imagine the ship.

Good metaphors generate new ways to perceive, explain and invent. Calling Disney employees “cast members” is one example. A metaphor or proverb lets us think about a difficult idea through an easier one. Feature creep works against that simplicity, and a message has to respect the limits of what people can learn and remember at once.

For Queal, I wondered how to explain a product we ourselves found difficult to describe in a way that was simple but still meaningful. That raised questions about feature creep, the order in which we showed information, and what could be left out. It also raised the risk of decision paralysis: should Queal and WundrBar/Go appear as alternatives to each other, or as alternatives to breakfast, dinner and other meals?

These were rough message and product ideas, not settled claims about Queal:

• “Queal – it’s a meal”; “Queal – easy meal”; “Queal – easier meal”; “Queal – it’s a meal, stupid”; and “Queal – healthy breakfast”.
• Present Queal as a quick, easy meal like a sandwich, but better: easier to make, store and take away, easier for getting vitamins and minerals, and perhaps a way to do more in life.
• Describe Boost as twenty-first-century coffee, with caffeine for energy and LT for focus, taken with any drink; a version-two idea was “Connecting you”.
• Describe Queal Go as a portable meal, “Nutritious like a salad, tasty like a Mars”. Another product idea was a tub with 400 kcal and 700 kcal serving sizes, with online pricing for 400 kcal.
• Lieke’s proposals were “More access to life”, “Door to efficiency”, “A productive lifestyle”, “Complete nutrition for body and mind”, “Enjoy life to the fullest” and “Key to productivity”.

The goal was for friends and customers to describe Queal consistently as an “easy meal”. At the time, I thought they gave three different descriptions, which undermined the clarity of that core message. I wrote the shorthand “3=0” to capture the loss of a clear message.

Unexpected

Unexpectedness begins by breaking a familiar pattern. The Heaths argue that people notice changes, much as a blinking warning light catches the eye. Surprise earns attention, while interest keeps it. In the Dollar Shave Club example, the pattern to challenge was the high price of razor blades.

Surprise works when a message violates an expectation and then offers an insight that makes sense afterwards. A gimmick unrelated to the core message will not do. The idea should be unpredictable before the reveal but understandable in retrospect: break the audience’s “guessing machine” and then help repair it.

Start by finding what is counterintuitive about the core message. What follows from it, and why is it not already happening? Present the idea in a way that unsettles the audience’s assumption, then help them revise their understanding. A mystery can sustain attention by opening a question that the rest of the story closes.

Curiosity arises from a gap between what we know and what we want to know. A story opens that gap with questions and unfinished situations, then resolves it. Context matters: people need enough information to care about the question before they will follow the answer. That is why the order of information can feel more like flirting than lecturing. Human-interest stories are one example; the broader aim is an insight that changes how an audience understands the world.

Applied to Queal, the questions were which assumptions about food we could challenge, how we could make the answer satisfying rather than gimmicky, and whether a mystery could make people curious. I also wondered what questions we wanted customers to ask and in what order we should give them information.

One possible story was living on shakes for 30 days. Soylent stories attracted interest because they challenged the expectation that food must be eaten or prepared conventionally; explaining the nutrients in the mix could then resolve the surprise. I wondered whether Queal could tell a story that prompted “How does this work?” and “Does it really work?”

Other rough angles included avoiding grocery trips, having everything delivered, and showing the inconvenience of shopping before offering to “save yourself the trouble”. An apocalypse version felt potentially too far from the core message; portraying the grocery store badly might also be gimmicky.

A video could show why the product contains what it does. I considered a lab-coat story, stacks of research papers, stock footage about nutrition, or a deliberately funny scene measuring scoops of food or even excrement. The unresolved question was how much of the story should be about the science of the food and how much about the research behind it.

Concrete

Abstraction can make an idea harder to understand and remember. The land-reserve example made ownership tangible by giving people specific plots with names. If something can be examined through the senses, it is concrete.

Concrete language helps especially when people are new to a subject. The details give an idea more hooks for memory, while abstractions are easier to lose. The notes cite the brown-eyes and blue-eyes experiment as another example.

Experts may think comfortably in abstractions, but novices often need concrete examples. That gap is part of the curse of knowledge. For customers seeking something easy and reliable, physical props may communicate better than claims of complexity or sophistication.

For Queal, “saving an hour a day” could make time concrete; another phrasing was an extra hour for a valued activity or for loved ones. I had not chosen which example worked best. Comparing Queal with a familiar food such as a sandwich could also help. The copy should focus on ease and reliability rather than make the product sound complicated. The Ideas, Where to implement and Goal fields remained open.

Credible

Credibility can come from people we already trust, such as parents or friends, or from recognised authorities, experts and celebrities. The notes also mention anti-authorities, as in anti-smoking messages. What matters is the source’s honesty and trustworthiness, not only status. A message can also earn credibility internally through concrete, vivid details.

Numbers can be hard to absorb on their own. The Heaths favour human-scale statistics, whose size and context give people a way to understand them. A claim that can be tested, such as a comparison of Wendy’s burger sizes, can also be persuasive. The example question “Are you better off than 4 years ago?” shows how a simple measure can connect to experience. A few vivid details may work better than a barrage of figures.

For Queal, I wondered who might credibly speak about the product: an IT worker, a better-known technologist, a businessperson or a hiker. The source needed to sound honest and speak from the heart about benefits rather than merely recite ingredients. Ingredients and use cases could also be described vividly. My rough fictional scene read: “When popping down for a great coding session on the 45th floor of the .. building, Peter Jackson sits down at his XSID computer. Before the starts he opens his … bag and out comes a shaker. With precision he measures 3 scoops … etc)”

Emotional

An individual story can move people more than a large statistic, which may put them in an analytical frame of mind. The point of an emotional message is to make people care. At the same time, repeatedly using a feeling or a word can stretch it until it loses force, so the associations chosen for an idea need to be distinctive.

Appealing to self-interest means spelling out what a benefit enables for the person reading. The notes suggest carrying that through to headlines and asking, “What’s in it for you?” They also observe that identity can shape a decision. I wanted to apply that question to Queal.

One historical positioning idea was to emphasise what Queal might help someone do, rather than money or a basic product feature; perhaps it could even speak to self-actualisation. In those notes I wrote that Queal was not the tastiest food but was made to help people perform at their best. That was a proposed message, not a checked present-day product claim.

The slogan candidates here were “Ready, Steady, Go”, “Meals to make you do more”, “Be Ready”, “Do more”, and “So you can take control”. I had not decided whether doing more or having more control was the stronger benefit.