How to make your message stick

A message 'sticks' when the recipient remembers it accurately and repeats it to others without you in the room. **Chip & Dan Heath (2007)** studied decades of urban legends, effective ad campaigns, and memorable lessons to find the common thread: **Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story** — their SUCCES framework. Most forgettable messages fail on the first two: they are cluttered and they hold no surprise. A message sticks when it lands one clear idea in a vivid, unexpected way.

The **curse of knowledge** is the cognitive bias where, once you know something, you cannot remember what it felt like not to know it. **Heath & Heath (2007)** identified it as the single biggest reason smart people communicate poorly. You pile on context, qualifications, and jargon because they feel _necessary_ to you — but your audience lacks the background to absorb them. The fix is not simplification for its own sake; it is _concreteness_. Replace the abstract with a specific example, a named person, or a tangible number, and the curse lifts.

SUCCES is the acronym **Chip & Dan Heath (2007)** built from their research into why certain ideas survive and others die. **Simple** — one core idea, everything else cut. **Unexpected** — open a gap in the listener's knowledge so curiosity pulls them forward. **Concrete** — sensory language, not category labels. **Credible** — a vivid detail or a testable claim, not a credential. **Emotional** — make them feel something for a specific person, not a statistic. **Story** — a challenge met or a transformation, however brief. You rarely need all six at once; landing three is usually enough.

Three is the functional ceiling for most listeners. **Carmine Gallo (2010)** documented Steve Jobs's consistent use of the rule of three across Apple keynotes — every product launch, every headline, every product had exactly three defining attributes. The pattern is not arbitrary: the **rule of three** is one of the oldest rhetorical devices precisely because working memory can hold roughly three new chunks before it starts dropping them. If your message has five key points, you have two too many. Pick the three that matter and let the rest live in the appendix.

Surprise triggers a dopamine release that flags the information as worth encoding. **Carmine Gallo (2011)** drew on neuroscience research to show that counterintuitive or unexpected information reliably improves retention compared to information that confirms what the audience already believes. The practical implication: find the _counterintuitive truth_ in your message and lead with it. Not a manufactured shock, but a genuine reversal — the finding that contradicts the conventional wisdom in your field. That reversal is what makes the message worth repeating.

The **picture-superiority effect** — documented across memory research — shows that people recall images far more reliably than abstract words. **Steven Pinker (2014)** argues in _The Sense of Style_ that good writers instinctively translate abstractions into scenes: instead of 'high employee turnover', write 'a new face at the front desk every eight weeks.' **Lisa Cron (2012)** extends this to storytelling: the brain is wired to track specific characters in specific situations, not general principles. Concrete, vivid images are not decorative — they are the mechanism by which ideas move from short-term to long-term memory.

**Brandt Pinvidic (2019)** calls this 'the three-minute rule' — your core message must be deliverable in the time it takes to ride an elevator, because that is the version your audience will actually pass on. To survive retelling, a message needs: one **core idea** (not three), one **concrete detail** that anchors the idea, and one **reason to care** (a cost, a reward, or a person). Strip out anything that requires you to be present to explain. If the retold version loses nothing important, the message is robust.

No — and conflating the two is a common mistake. Brevity removes words; stickiness requires the _right_ words. A one-sentence message can be completely forgettable if it is abstract ('we drive value creation'). A four-paragraph message can be unforgettable if it is concrete, unexpected, and emotional. That said, brevity usually helps stickiness because it forces you to choose. The discipline of cutting forces you to decide what the single core idea actually is — which is the real work. See our piece on [how to be more persuasive](/en/blog/how-to-be-more-persuasive) for how brevity and clarity interact in practice.

**Heath & Heath (2007)** suggest starting with the Sesame Street test: could a ten-year-old understand the idea and explain it to a friend? If not, you haven't found the core yet — you've found a category. Keep asking 'what does this _mean_ for the person in front of me?' until you reach something with a consequence they can picture. The single core idea is usually not the most interesting thing you know; it is the thing that changes what the audience will _do_ next. Strip everything that doesn't serve that change.

The same principles apply at the one-to-one scale. When you need someone to understand something important — a difficult request, a piece of feedback, an apology — the curse of knowledge is still your biggest obstacle. You know the full context; they don't. Leading with a concrete example rather than an abstract principle lands faster and sticks longer. Our guide on [how to change someone's mind](/en/blog/how-to-change-someones-mind) covers how concreteness and emotional grounding work together in persuasive personal conversations, and [how to have a difficult conversation](/en/blog/how-to-have-a-difficult-conversation) applies the same logic to high-stakes exchanges.