Made to Stick by Chip Heath Page B

into our memories. Surprise gets our attention. Sometimes the attention is fleeting, but in other cases surprise can lead to enduring attention. Surprise can prompt us to hunt for underlying causes, to imagine other possibilities, to figure out how to avoid surprises in the future.
    Researchers who study conspiracy theories, for instance, have noted that many of them arise when people are grappling with unexpectedevents, such as when the young and attractive die suddenly. There are conspiracy theories about the sudden deaths of JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and Kurt Cobain. There tends to be less conspiratorial interest in the sudden deaths of ninety-year-olds.
    Surprise makes us want to find an answer—to resolve the question of why we were surprised—and big surprises call for big answers. If we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises.
Avoiding Gimmickry
    Going for a big surprise, though, can cause a big problem. It’s easy to step over the line into gimmickry.
    The late 1990s was the heyday of the dot-com bubble. Venture-backed start-ups poured millions of dollars into advertising to establish their brands. With increasing amounts of money chasing a finite amount of consumer attention, ads had to work harder and harder to provoke surprise and interest.
    During the Super Bowl of 2000, an ad ran that opened with a college marching band practicing on a football field. We’re shown close-ups of the band members as they execute their precision movements. Then we cut to the stadium tunnel, which leads out onto the field—and suddenly a dozen ravenous wolves rush onto the field. Band members scatter in terror as the wolves hunt them down and attack.
    What was this advertisement for? We have no idea. There’s no question that this ad was surprising and memorable. To this day, we remember the tastelessly comic image of the wolves chasing the terrified band members. But because the surprise was utterly nongermane to the message that needed to be communicated, it was worthless. If the product being advertised had been “mauling-proof band uniforms,” on the other hand, the ad could have been an award winner.
    In this sense, the wolves ad is the opposite of the Enclave ad. Bothads contain powerful surprises, but only the Enclave ad uses that surprise to reinforce its core message. In Chapter 1 we discussed the importance of finding the core in your ideas. Using surprise in the service of a core message can be extremely powerful.
Hension and Phraug
    Below is a list of four words. Read each one and take a second to determine whether it’s a real English word.
    HENSION
BARDLE
PHRAUG
TAYBL
    According to Bruce Whittlesea and Lisa Williams, the researchers who developed this task, “PHRAUG and TAYBL often cause raised eyebrows, and an ‘Oh!’ reaction. HENSION and BARDLE often cause a frown.”
    PHRAUG and TAYBL cause the surprise brow because they
look
unfamiliar but
sound
familiar. The “Oh!” reaction comes when we realize that PHRAUG is just a funny way to spell FROG.
    HENSION and BARDLE are more troubling. They seem oddly familiar, because they borrow letter combinations from common words. They have the look of SAT words—fancy vocabulary that we should probably know but don’t. But HENSION and BARDLE are made-up words. When we realize that we’ve been struggling to find a nonexistent solution, we get frustrated.
    HENSION and BARDLE provide an example of surprise without insight. So far, we’ve talked a lot about the power of surprise, and how surprise can make our ideas stickier. But although HENSION and BARDLE are surprising, they aren’t sticky; they’re just frustrating. What we see now is that surprise isn’t enough. We also need
insight
.
    To be surprising, an event can’t be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable.” The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not something you