Friday, November 20, 2009

A Book in Review: Made to Stick

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die By: Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Non-fiction: business, physiology, 252 pages
Book Count: 69

This book is all about why some ideas stick with us and some do not. It is written by two brothers that were both working on the same general idea, but from different angles. Some of this information is common sense, but a lot of it is things that you would never think about. It also is a fun read for being a non-fiction informational book. For example, when talking about why urban legends stick with you they pointed out that ". . . our friends' friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves?" Referring to the fact that the stories always happen to a friend of a friend. It talks about six main things that make something stick as well as things that do not work and ways that using the thing does not work. For example, something unexpected helps people remember an ad; however, if the unexpected thing is not related to the product people will remember the ad with no idea what the ad was really for. For examples of the different ideas you also learn about a lot of interesting back stories for everything from how Jared became a spokesperson for Subway to how "Don't Mess with Texas" got started. (Interesting enough, Subway didn't plan on the Jared ads being national and the people first messing with Texas were the people you would think of as stereotypical Texans.)

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