Who Spoiled Halloween? Six Principles of Sticky Ideas

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath, Ph.D., Dan Heath

(Page 4 of 7)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the tradition of Halloween trick-or-treating came under attack. Rumors circulated about Halloween sadists who put razor blades in apples and booby-trapped pieces of candy. The rumors affected the Halloween tradition nationwide. Parents carefully examined their children's candy bags. Schools opened their doors at night so that kids could trick-or-treat in a safe environment. Hospitals volunteered to X-ray candy bags.

In 1985, an ABC News poll showed that 60 percent of parents worried that their children might be victimized. To this day, many parents warn their children not to eat any snacks that aren't prepackaged. This is a sad story: a family holiday sullied by bad people who, inexplicably, wish to harm children. But in 1985 the story took a strange twist. Researchers discovered something shocking about the candy-tampering epidemic: It was a myth.

The researchers, sociologists Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, studied every reported Halloween incident since 1958. They found no instances where strangers caused children life-threatening harm on Halloween by tampering with their candy.

Two children did die on Halloween, but their deaths weren't caused by strangers. A five-year-old boy found his uncle's heroin stash and overdosed. His relatives initially tried to cover their tracks by sprinkling heroin on his candy. In another case, a father, hoping to collect on an insurance settlement, caused the death of his own son by contaminating his candy with cyanide.

In other words, the best social science evidence reveals that taking candy from strangers is perfectly okay. It's your family you should worry about. The candy-tampering story has changed the behavior of millions of parents over the past thirty years. Sadly, it has made neighbors suspicious of neighbors. It has even changed the laws of this country: Both California and New Jersey passed laws that carry special penalties for candy-tamperers. Why was this idea so successful?

Six Principles of Sticky Ideas

The Halloween-candy story is, in a sense, the evil twin of the CSPI story.

Both stories highlighted an unexpected danger in a common activity: eating Halloween candy and eating movie popcorn. Both stories called for simple action: examining your child's candy and avoiding movie popcorn. Both made use of vivid, concrete images that cling easily to memory: an apple with a buried razor blade and a table full of greasy foods. And both stories tapped into emotion: fear in the case of Halloween candy and disgust in the case of movie popcorn.

The Kidney Heist, too, shares many of these traits. A highly unexpected outcome: a guy who stops for a drink and ends up one kidney short of a pair. A lot of concrete details: the ice-filled bathtub, the weird tube protruding from the lower back. Emotion: fear, disgust, suspicion.

We began to see the same themes, the same attributes, reflected in a wide range of successful ideas. What we found based on Chip's research-and by reviewing the research of dozens of folklorists, psychologists, educational researchers, political scientists, and proverbhunters- was that sticky ideas shared certain key traits. There is no "formula" for a sticky idea-we don't want to overstate the case. But sticky ideas do draw from a common set of traits, which make them more likely to succeed.

It's like discussing the attributes of a great basketball player. You can be pretty sure that any great player has some subset of traits like height, speed, agility, power, and court sense. But you don't need all of these traits in order to be great: Some great guards are five feet ten and scrawny. And having all the traits doesn't guarantee greatness: No doubt there are plenty of slow, clumsy seven-footers. It's clear, though, that if you're on the neighborhood court, choosing your team from among strangers, you should probably take a gamble on the seven-foot dude.

Ideas work in much the same way. One skill we can learn is the ability to spot ideas that have "natural talent," like the seven-foot stranger. Later in the book, we'll discuss Subway's advertising campaign that focused on Jared, an obese college student who lost more than 200 pounds by eating Subway sandwiches every day. The campaign was a huge success. And it wasn't created by a Madison Avenue advertising agency; it started with a single store owner who had the good sense to spot an amazing story.

But here's where our basketball analogy breaks down: In the world of ideas, we can genetically engineer our players. We can create ideas with an eye to maximizing their stickiness.

As we pored over hundreds of sticky ideas, we saw, over and over, the same six principles at work.

Principle 1: Simplicity

How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, "If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won't remember any." To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission- sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

Copyright © 2007 by Chip Heath & Dan Heath.

About the Author

Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He has taught courses on organizational behavior, negotiation, strategy and international strategy at the University of Chicago School of Business and The Fuqua School of Business at Duke. His research examines why certain ideas-ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths, survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas. Chip designed a course at Stanford that examines the principles of naturally sticky ideas to design messages that would be more effective. Chip is the co-author of a book titled What Sticks - Why Some Ideas Work in the World and Others Don't. The book will be published by Random House in 2007. Chip has taught and consulted on the topic of making ideas stick at such companies as Nissan, Chronicle Books, Ideo, as well as West Point.

Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.