How KOR is Using Ideas from Made To Stick

I had the chance to read Made To Stick a few years back so it was good to find a reason to pick it up again. In this post I’d like to run through a few key chapters and how those are being utilized at KOR. The first is from chapter 3 where the Heath brothers run through how concrete ideas can help people relate to something that they’ve already experienced. Lastly, how triggers in chapter 4 can help make an idea credible.

In chapter 3 the Heath brothers explain how concrete examples are something the senses can capture and help relate to something people have already experienced. In turn this helps people understand and remember ideas that could be hard to explain due to their complexity. The authors give some excellent examples of how this was used when pitching movie ideas to Hollywood producers (e.g. the movie Speed being pitched as “Die Hard on a Bus”). I’ve pulled this section from the book as it relates to something we’re currently dealing with at KOR, specifically with our KOR Plus water bottle and filter.

KOR Plus is an innovative way for people to take regular tap water and transform it into hydrogen rich, alkaline water. To use the bottle is simply. After installing the filter into the straw, the user fills the water bottle up and pulls water through the straw and filter which creates the hydrogen alkaline water. The science behind hydrogen water has been around for a few years but is not well known. In a nutshell, hydrogen water unlocks the antioxidants already in the body to fend off free radicals and aid in preventing some diseases as well as oxidative stress in muscles. Just from this last sentence alone you can see how explaining this process to prospects coming to our web page can and does make their eyes glaze over due to its complexity. We are actually on our third positioning iteration for KOR Plus attempting to explain this as easy and non-scientific as possible. In doing so our next position is less on the science and more on this being a tool to get benefits likes this from the water you’re already drinking. These latest directly relate to this concrete idea. The use of “Just Add Water” is something we plan on leveraging as it’s an idea that is familiar to most people and a way for us to relate our product to something people have already experienced. This phrase is used for a number of food products ranging from Raman to juices and should do a much better job making KOR Plus a convenient tool to get antioxidant rich alkaline water.

In chapter 4 the Heather brothers present a number of triggers that can make an idea credible. One trigger in particular that I found interesting and we’ve been practicing at KOR is around contextualizing statistics. Obviously reusable water bottles can remove hundreds of thousands of one time use disposable water bottles from the planet but what does that look like in an individual's mind when all they’re used to is the cases of bottled water they buy at Costco? That’s exactly what we do with our advertising with our KOR Nava and Water Fall filtered products. Similar to Brita filters, these two products will filter out chlorine and odor from tap water. To effectively communicate the benefits of this product we compare how many cases of water customers will not need to buy when using our products. With this we’ve been able to contextualize water bottle waste statistics in a manner that a customer is familiar with (e.g. “One filter equals 4 cases of bottled water”).

Chapter 3 and 4 are just a slice of what Made To Stick had to offer and was an excellent read. It’s definitely one of those reference books that will be pulled down from time to time to help with ideas for future marketing initiatives regardless of the product being marketed. Overall the book brought a ton of ideas to the table that I'm looking forward to integrate and test.