Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf - Brief article - Book review

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. By Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Random House | 291 pages | $24.95.

Fundamentally, Made to Stick is about communication, and why some works far better than others. It's about how to craft images and messages that the audience remembers and can learn from, and that could be a corporate directive as easily as a television spot.

Brothers Chip and Dan Heath--a professor at Stanford Business School and a corporate education consultant at Duke, respectively--construct the book around six key ideas. These are summarized by the acronym SUCCES: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotional and stories. Each is the subject of a chapter laden with nicely chosen real-world examples.

Some of those are well-known, like the "where's the beef" campaign from Wendy's years ago, or the recent Subway spots featuring Jared Fogel. The first, featuring octogenarian Clara Peller inquiring about the beef content of a rival burger, became an advertising...