A biology teacher spends an hour explaining mitosis, and a week later only three kids remember what it is.
A manager makes a speech unveiling a new strategy as the staffers nod their heads enthusiastically, and the next day the frontline employees are observed cheerfully implementing the old one.
"Good ideas often have a hard time succeeding in the world." Yet the ridiculous Kidney Heist stories and spineless ideas like "Great Wall of China is the only man-made object that is visible from space" keep circulating, with no resources whatsoever to support it.
We fail to realize that The Wall is really long but not very wide. Think about it: If the Wall were visible, then any interstate highway would also be visible, and maybe a few Walmart superstores as well.
In their book "Made to Stick", Dan heath and Chip heath outline a story of sticky ideas. The story of American Theatre Popcorns.
Silverman worked for the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a nonprofit group that educates the public about nutrition. The CSPI sent bags of movie popcorn from a dozen theaters in three major cities to a lab for nutritional analysis. The results surprised everyone. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends that a normal diet contain no more than 20 grams of saturated fat each day. According to the lab results, the typical bag of popcorn had 37 grams. The culprit was coconut oil, which theaters used to pop their popcorn. Coconut oil had some big advantages over other oils. It gave the popcorn a nice, silky texture, and released a more pleasant and natural aroma than the alternative oils. Unfortunately, as the lab results showed, coconut oil was also brimming with saturated fat.
The single serving of popcorn on Silverman's desk—a snack someone might scarf down between meals—had nearly two days' worth of saturated fat. And those 37 grams of saturated fat were packed into a medium-sized serving of popcorn. No doubt a sizeable bucket could have cleared triple digits. The challenge, Silverman realized, was that few people know what "37 grams of saturated fat" means. Most of us don't memorize the USDA's daily nutrition recommendations. Is 37 grams good or bad? And even if we have an intuition that it's bad, we'd wonder if it was "bad bad" (like cigarettes) or "normal bad" (like a cookie or a milkshake).
What is the yardstick along which we can measure how bad it is?
"Saturated fat has zero appeal," Silverman says. "It's dry, it's academic, who cares?"
Silverman could have created some kind of visual comparison— perhaps an advertisement comparing the amount of saturated fat in the popcorn with the USDA's recommended daily allowance. Think of a bar graph, with one of the bars stretching twice as high as the other. But that was too scientific and mathematical somehow. The amount of fat in this popcorn was, in some sense ludicrous. The CSPI needed a way to shape the message in a way that completely communicated this ludicrousness. Silverman came up with a solution. CSPI called a press conference on September 27, 1992. Here's the message it presented: "A medium-sized 'butter' popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings —combined!" The folks at CSPI didn't neglect the visuals—they laid out the full buffet of greasy food for the television cameras. An entire day's worth of unhealthy eating, displayed on a table. All that saturated fat stuffed into a single bag of popcorn.
The story was an immediate sensation, featured on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN. It made the front pages of USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post's Style section. Letterman cracked jokes about fat-soaked popcorn, and headline writers trotted out some fascinating one-liners: "Popcorn Gets an 'R' Rating", "Theater Popcorn is Double Feature of Fat."
This brings us to a thoughtful question - Are ideas inherently interesting or uninteresting or It depends upon how we frame them. It is a nature vs nurture debate which forms the envelope in which the crux of "Made to Stick" lies.
More about this in the next blog. Stick around for the next sticky blog