Made to Stick

What is it that makes urban myths so persistent but many everyday truths so eminently forgettable? How do advertisers set about ensuring that their slogans are memorable? And why do we find it difficult to remember the letters J FKFB INAT O, but easy to remember the same sequence when it's laid out as JFK FBI NATO?

In the course of over ten years of study and thousands of interviews, Chip and Dan Heath have established precisely what it is that determines whether particular ideas or stories stick in our minds or not, and Made to Stick is the fascinating outcome of their painstaking research. Packed full of case histories and thought-provoking anecdotes it shows, among other things, how one small US airline used a simple catchphrase to catapult itself into the big time, how a gifted sports reporter got people to watch a football match by showing them the outside of the stadium, how a radical new anti-littering advertising campaign succeeded beyond its originators' wildest dreams, and why, sometimes, prior knowledge can actually be counter-productive. Entertaining and informative by turns, this is a fascinating account of a key area of human behaviour, and one that also has a direct practical application, offering a set of principles we can all adopt to make sure that we can get our own ideas across effectively.