Book Review on Digital Marketing Psychology:

Made to Stick – Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip and Dan Heath

Digital Marketing Psychology with Ideas that Stick

Digital Marketing needs fresh thought provoking ideas that hit hard and last.

Mega Advertisers, like Coca Cola & McDonalds, seem to have the Digital Marketing Psychology magic formula for creating powerful marketing.

In this Book, Authors and Brothers Chip and Dan Heath explain the formula for generating a story that sticks.

Also, they tell great marketing stories & even some theories like the ‘Velcro Theory of Memory’.

I found this book has powerful thought provoking ideas on marketing that shatter the readers previous expectations.

The authors teach us how common conceptions in marketing are hindering us from ideas that stick through stories and digital marketing psychology experiments.

Can you Guess the Song?

One example illustrated in this book is an experiment by Elizabeth Newton to her students in Stafford University.

In this experiment, Newton taps out the popular song “Happy Birthday” and asks each student to identify the song.

To her surprise, the results confirmed that only 1/40 students were able to correctly name the song she had in mind.

Experiments like this teach digital marketers that ideas we have of how our audience will perceive what we are trying to convey can often be misleading.

The authors labeled this Digital Marketing Psychology phenomenon as “the curse of knowledge”, which “makes our communication either confusing or boring”.

This curse is also why some very talented and educated writers and scientists end up writing papers that almost no one can enjoy or understand.

Alas, The moral of the author’s lesson is simple.

If we as marketers can’t communicate our ideas effectively & simply, it becomes a waste of time and effort to create the presentation.

Psychology in Marketing

The authors of this book devised Digital Marketing Psychology techniques to avoid “the curse of knowledge”.

Ideas that stick are:

•  Interesting
• Actionable
• Memorable

For example, from this book we learn about an experiment conducted by social psychologist Robert Cialdini.

It began when Cialdini visited the ASU library in hopes of finding a compelling method of teaching his students.

He started to collect a number of scientific journals to gather information.

To his dismay, he found that these scholarly journals were full of jargon.

This made them painfully boring, although packed with knowledge.

Cialdini eventually found an astronomy book that began with a question about the rings of Saturn.

He thought that it was very provoking.

Next, he found himself immersed in the journal searching for the answers.

The Journal slowly unveiled the answers, leaving the reader engaged.

In conclusion, the social psychologist determined that a digital marketing psychology phenomenon was at play.

It was akin to sitting through a bad movie.

As humans, we force ourselves to continue because we need to know how the story is going to end.

To create a great Marketing campaign that sticks it is important to create a sense of mystery.

The authors advise digital marketers to get our audience thinking “what’s going to happen next?” and “How is this going to end?”.

Compelling Messages & Delivery Tactics

Another story our authors present includes a digital marketing psychology tactic used by the United States Department of Transportation.

After scrutiny, their safety message had been ineffective in sticking with viewers in previous campaigns.

So the marketing was presented with a new approach.

What seemed like a car commercial presenting a mini van and it’s features played.

The commercial depicted a family traveling home as the announcer listed off the various features of the vehicle.

Suddenly, the van is struck dramatically in the side by a speeding car with a massive force shocking viewers.

The screen fades to black and the safety message for “wear your seat belt” appears.

The shock resonates with viewers long after the commercial and also creates word of mouth advertisement.

The Heath brothers teach us that you can capture attention through the use of Digital Marketing Psychology with unexpected storytelling in your message.

Get Real

Lastly, we learn that a personal message is much more compelling and memorable than a general fact.

In another example, we learn of a 2004 study done by researchers at Carnegie Melon.

Then, The Digital Marketing Psychology Study showed more than double the donations go to a specific child vs. the general donations to Starving Children in Africa.

When a digital marketer is delivering a message, they typically expect their audience to care about the message as much as they do.

Stories are much more effective in building empathy of an audience than a general fact or cause.

Personal stories “are like flight simulators for the mind” and allow the listener to play the protagonist in the story and this is a key tactic in Digital Marketing Psychology.

I found this book entertaining, inspiring, and informative and hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

To purchase this book please visit your local retailer, amazon, or online book store.

For a Similar Read:

Try “The Business of Getting Business” by Joe Manausa.