Chip and Dan Heath: Context Profile

What this is for: Turning Claude or ChatGPT into a Heath-style message reviewer that diagnoses why your essay, headline, or core idea is not landing and tells you which of the six stickiness traits you are missing.

Who this is for: Newsletter writers and solo creators who keep watching good ideas go in one reader’s ear and out the other and want a structural way to make their writing memorable enough to be repeated.

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Made to Stick came out in 2007. Chip Heath teaches at Stanford, Dan Heath has spent his career at Duke, and together they spent years reverse-engineering why some ideas survive in human memory and most do not. They studied urban legends, proverbs, ad campaigns, public health messaging, and military doctrine to find the pattern. The result is the SUCCESs framework, and almost every sticky message you can think of uses some version of it.

This post gives you the Heaths as a context profile. Drop the JSON below into Claude or ChatGPT and ask the model to evaluate your draft, your tagline, or your core message through their lens. The model will tell you what is missing, where you are stuck on the abstract end of the concreteness ladder, and which of your stories are doing more work than you realize.

What you get

Eight frameworks that map the Heaths’ system: SUCCESs at the top, then Find the Core, the Curiosity Gap, the Concreteness Ladder, the Six Sources of Credibility, One vs. Many, the Three Story Plots, and the Curse of Knowledge as the diagnostic that ties them all together. Plus ten operating beliefs, twelve vocabulary terms used the way the Heaths use them, the limitations of the framework, and the JSON ready to paste.

The thesis

Most ideas die in the gap between the speaker and the listener because the speaker has the curse of knowledge and cannot remember what it was like not to know. Sticky ideas share six traits that survive that gap: they are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and built around a story. Ideas that get remembered, repeated, and acted on tend to use most of these traits. Ideas that fail tend to use almost none of them.

Why this matters for newsletter writers

Most newsletter advice is about voice or hook craft. The Heaths operate one layer underneath. Before you choose a hook, before you write a sentence, you have to know whether the core idea you are trying to communicate is even built to be remembered. SUCCESs is a structural test, not a stylistic one. Once you can see which traits your draft has and which it lacks, the editing decisions stop feeling subjective and start feeling diagnostic. You stop polishing prose that was never going to stick and start fixing the thing that was actually broken.

Preview: The SUCCESs Framework

Six traits, one acronym. Most sticky ideas have most of them. Most failed ideas have almost none.

Simple. Find the one essential thing and protect it from everything else. The Heaths borrow Commander’s Intent from the Army: if your reader remembers one sentence, what must it be? Simple is not dumb. Simple is prioritized.

Unexpected. Break a pattern to grab attention, then open a curiosity gap to keep it. Surprise alone is not enough. The surprise has to point at the core idea, not away from it.

Concrete. Move down the concreteness ladder until the idea has sensory hooks the reader’s brain can grab. Sarah from Portland, not one of our users. Three rings, not quickly. JFK said put a man on the moon and bring him home, not pursue space leadership.

Credible. Give the reader something they can verify themselves. Authority works. Anti-authority works. Vivid details work. Statistics work when they are translated into something a person can picture. The strongest credibility comes from a claim the reader can test.

Emotional. People feel things for one named person, not for millions. Pick one. Give them a name, a place, a problem the reader recognizes. Identity moves people more reliably than self-interest, especially over time.

Story. The Heaths describe stories as flight simulators for the brain. They let the reader rehearse the action you want them to take and supply the motivation to take it. You almost never have to invent stories. They already exist in your work. The job is to spot them and tell them well.

The whole framework is held together by one diagnostic, the curse of knowledge, which is the reason almost every important message fails on first draft.

That is one of eight frameworks in the full profile. The other seven, plus the operating beliefs, the vocabulary, the limitations, and the JSON you can paste into Claude, are below for paid subscribers.