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There are urban legends that are widely believed, even though they're untrue.

Most recently, Vice President candidate J.D. Vance spread the story of "illegal Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio eating their neighbors' cats and dogs." The story became a meme spread on the internet, despite the Mayor of Springfield and the Governor of Ohio stating the story is false. The Haitians were invited to come work in Springfield legally and don't eat pets. The entire community has been disrupted by a false story in a political campaign.

Can a true, worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as a false idea?

This question is not only important in politics, it's also important in education, marketing, management, science, and many other applications.

Authors Chip Heath and his brother, Dan Heath, believe worthwhile ideas can, and they have developed a method to do it. They explain the method in their book, Made To Stick.

The acronym for the method is SUCCESs.

• Simple - Identify the core message to be communicated. What's most important? Focus on that and leave out information that's not as important.

• Unexpected - What surprising elements can be included in your message. "Eating cats and dogs" is a horrific image for Americans. A book about mammalian physiology had the title, Why Do Men Have Nipples? The gap theory of curiosity says curiosity comes from a gap between what we know and what we want to know. Weave a mystery into your communications.
• Concrete - Most of us zone out when learning about something abstract. Illustrating an abstract idea with something in the person's experience makes it understandable and more interesting. For example, students can understand percentages when using the example of money (dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels and cents.)
• Credible - Why should a person believe a statement? Sometimes they can relate to a personal experience or the experience of someone they know. Science experiments demonstrate scientific principles. Product demonstrations prove performance. Giving facts and statistics helps demonstrate that a message is credible.
• Emotion - When people feel something, communication becomes much more memorable. With the "cats and dogs" story, the Trump campaign has tapped people's deep love for their pets. Showing a photo or video of war atrocities makes a deeper impression than talking about them.
• Story - From the time we are small children, we are conditioned to listen to stories. Stories have been used throughout history to pass down historical events, traditions and lessons, such as in the Bible, the Iliad and Aesops Fables. People understand ideas better when presented with a similar situation story.

Make your communications better understood and remembered by your audience. Get and study Made to Stick and use the SUCCESs method.

Buy it on Amazon: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

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