Making B2B Marketing Messages More Memorable: An Interview with Chip Heath

As a professor at Stanford University, Chip Heath has listened to his students pass on the same ridiculous urban legends that he heard as a student—that we only use 10% of our brains, or that the Great Wall of China is visible from space, for example. He became curious to discover the attributes of urban legends that make them "sticky," or durable over time, so that he could apply those lessons to more useful ideas. The results of his research are outlined in a book he co-wrote with his brother Dan, called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. In this interview, he shares some of the ideas in the book.

ITSMA: Why is it so difficult to get marketing messages to stick in people's minds?

Chip Heath: B2B marketers have a very high standard of communication that they have to impart. A group of psychologists and behavioral economists has called this "the Curse of Knowledge." As we become experts, it becomes harder to imagine not knowing what we know. Think about how doctors and lawyers talk. They speak in such abstract, complex, convoluted ways that we're never quite sure we're getting the message. And it's not just people with fancy titles who have a problem with the Curse of Knowledge. Pick any 11-year-old boy and ask him to describe his favorite video game. You will be on the other side of the Curse of Knowledge. That 11-year-old cannot fathom the depths of your ignorance about that video game.

All of us are like that 11-year-old video gamer in our domain of expertise. We know the services that we're selling; we know the need for those things in the external marketplace. But the trick in getting our message across is to overcome the Curse of Knowledge.

ITSMA: Can you give us an example of a sticky idea?

Heath: In 1961, John F. Kennedy proposed that our nation put a man on the moon and return him safely within the course of the decade. Now, that was an idea that crossed boundaries. It organized the efforts of thousands of people across dozens of organizations, public and private, for the better part of 10 years. So when Dan and I started writing Made to Stick, we decided to survey the stickiest ideas in history, ranging from urban legends to corporate strategies that actually affect people's behavior and public health messages that actually work.

ITSMA: What were the common attributes across all the sticky ideas you researched?

Heath: We found six common themes. Sticky ideas are:

1. Simple
2. Unexpected
3. Concrete
4. Credible
5. Emotional
6. Stories

Scrabble fans will note that there is a little acronym built into this—SUCCESS without the final S.

ITSMA: What do you mean when you say that sticky ideas must be concrete?

Heath: Urban legends stick because they are concrete. They are sensory and visceral. There’s one that circulates about a gang of human-organ thieves that drug their victims and steal their organs. The victim wakes up in an ice-filled bathtub with a kidney missing. I can't hear that story without my body starting to shiver a little bit because of that ice-filled bathtub.

Now business language, on the other hand, is anything but tangible, sensory, and concrete. We pick buzzwords and combine them: strategic empowering vision … reciprocal cost-based reengineering.

I had a client that sold RFID (radio frequency identification) tags and software. They were practicing their business pitch and it was going badly. They were talking about "enterprise mobility solutions" and all sorts of technology details. I asked for an example and the client started talking about a law office that could attach an RFID tag to an important contract and never again lose it due to misfiling or because it's in an associate's office. A hospital could attach a tag to a prescription bottle and you could track the pills from the pharmacy all the way up to the patient's room. All of a sudden, those concrete examples helped the audience understand why everyone might want this service.

ITSMA: How can B2B marketers create memorable stories about their products and services?

Heath: Most of us make claims rather than telling stories that illustrate our claims. We say, "We have excellent customer service," or "We have partners that will tell you how good we are."

Instead, we should be telling stories that will imprint those claims with customers in a memorable way. For example, there is a concierge service called Circles that will do anything to help your employees so that they can spend time at work, as opposed to running around getting gift baskets or dinner reservations or house cleaning. Most of Circles' business is these mundane day-to-day things. But what they also have is a couple of stories about their ability to deliver extraordinary service: they call them sheep stories.

Here's one: There was a business manager who was taking a trip to Kenya. Through a weird combination of events, he was meeting with a tribal chieftain. In that area of Kenya, it is appropriate to show your gratitude to chieftains by delivering sheep. And so Circles managed to deliver a flock of sheep in Kenya for a business meeting.

Now that story gives me a lot of faith that they could do anything I need them to do. The challenge for marketers is to find those stories. The sheep story is more powerful than a page of statistics. If you want your message to stick in the marketplace, find your story.