Systematic Creativity

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

(Page 7 of 7)

Picture in your mind the type of person who's great at coming up with ideas. Have a mental image of the person? A lot of people, when asked to do this, describe a familiar stereotype-the "creative genius," the kind of person who thinks up slogans in a hot advertising agency. Maybe, like us, you picture someone with gelled hair and hip clothing, carrying a dog-eared notebook full of ironies and epiphanies, ready to drop everything and launch a four-hour brainstorming session in a room full of caffeine and whiteboards. Or maybe your stereotype isn't quite so elaborate.

There's no question that some people are more creative than others. Perhaps they're just born that way. So maybe you'll never be the Michael Jordan of sticky ideas. But the premise of this book is that creating sticky ideas is something that can be learned.

In 1999, an Israeli research team assembled a group of 200 highly regarded ads-ads that were finalists and award winners in the top advertising competitions. They found that 89 percent of the award-winning ads could be classified into six basic categories, or templates. That's remarkable. We might expect great creative concepts to be highly idiosyncratic-emerging from the whims of born creative types. It turns out that six simple templates go a long way.

Most of these templates relate to the principle of unexpectedness. For example, the Extreme Consequences template points out unexpected consequences of a product attribute. One ad emphasizes the power of a car stereo system-when the stereo belts out a tune, a bridge starts oscillating to the music, and when the speakers are cranked up the bridge shimmies so hard that it nearly collapses. This same template also describes the famous World War II slogan devised by the Ad Council, a nonprofit organization that creates publicservice campaigns for other nonprofits and government agencies: "Loose Lips Sink Ships." And speaking of extreme consequences, let's not forget the eggs sizzling in the 1980s commercial "This is your brain on drugs" (also designed by the Ad Council). The template also pops up spontaneously in naturally sticky ideas-for example, the legend that Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. (For the other templates, see the endnotes.)

The researchers also tried to use their six templates to classify 200 other ads-from the same publications and for the same types of products-that had not received awards. Amazingly, when the researchers tried to classify these "less successful" ads, they could classify only 2 percent of them.

The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It's like Tolstoy's quote: "All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

But if creative ads consistently make use of the same basic set of templates, perhaps "creativity" can be taught. Perhaps even novices- with no creative experience-could produce better ideas if they understood the templates. The Israeli researchers, curious about the ability to teach creativity, decided to see just how far a template could take someone.

They brought in three groups of novices and gave each group some background information about three products: a shampoo, a diet-food item, and a sneaker. One group received the background information on the products and immediately started generating ads, with no training. An experienced creative director, who didn't know how the group had been trained, selected its top fifteen ads. Then those ads were tested by consumers. The group's ads stood out: Consumers rated them as "annoying." (Could this be the long-awaited explanation for the ads of local car dealerships?)

A second group was trained for two hours by an experienced creativity instructor who showed the participants how to use a freeassociation brainstorming method. This technique is a standard method for teaching creativity; it's supposed to broaden associations, spark unexpected connections, and get lots of creative ideas on the table so that people can select the very best. If you've ever sat in a class on brainstorming great ideas, this method is probably the one you were taught. Again, the fifteen best ads were selected by the same creative director, who didn't know how the group had been trained, and the ads were then tested by consumers. This group's ads were rated as less annoying than those of the untrained group but no more creative.

The final group was trained for two hours on how to use the six creative templates. Once again, the fifteen best ads were selected by the creative director and tested with consumers. Suddenly these novices sprouted creativity. Their ads were rated as 50 percent more creative and produced a 55 percent more positive attitude toward the products advertised. This is a stunning improvement for a two-hour investment in learning a few basic templates! It appears that there are indeed systematic ways to produce creative ideas.

What this Israeli research team did for advertisements is what this book does for your ideas. We will give you suggestions for tailoring your ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience. We've created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose. But isn't the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we're not arguing that a "color by numbers" approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach?

Actually, yes, that's exactly what we're saying. If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

This book can't offer a foolproof recipe. We'll admit it up front: We won't be able to show you how to get twelve-year-olds to gossip about mitosis around the campfire. And in all likelihood your process-improvement memo will not circulate decades from now as a proverb in another culture. But we can promise you this: Regardless of your level of "natural creativity," we will show you how a little focused effort can make almost any idea stickier, and a sticky idea is an idea that is more likely to make a difference. All you need to do is understand the six principles of powerful ideas.

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.