One of the nice things about Halloween (just concluded) is that almost all the treats handed out come in their own tiny wrappings. In an age of excess, the art of the miniature has to be appreciated by those who have too much of anything, including candy.

Little things — ships in a bottle, snowy scenes in glass, saints on a key chain, Mars candy bars zipped up tight in their own plastic casings — these are inherently satisfying, cozy and safe.

Did anyone get (or give) an unprotected treat? Probably not since the 1970s when there were stories, it seemed everywhere, about razor blades embedded in Halloween apples.

But As Chip and Dan Heath point out in their book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, these tales of deadly spikes in Halloween candies were almost all urban legends.

In 1985, for example, one poll discovered that 60 per cent of parents thought their kids would be victimized on Halloween, so hospitals volunteered to X-ray candy bags. For decades, parents went through the loot, eating their favourite candies as part of the inspection. But except for a couple of bizarre examples, these stories were all untrue.

Yes, over the years, at least two children died because of Halloween. In 1970, a five-year-old boy in Detroit came across his uncle's heroin stash and, sampling it, overdosed. His parents tried to cover it up by sprinkling the drug on their son's Halloween treats.

Four years later, a father in Houston, Tex., laced his eight-year-old son's candy with cyanide to collect on an insurance policy. The father was convicted and later executed.

But nobody, as far as the Heath brothers have discovered, has died from taking candy from a stranger, the real fear parents have. Still, the story sticks.

The keys to stickiness

The Heath brothers are both students of business and their book is a New York Times bestseller. In this age of marketing, everybody wants to know the secret of what sticks.

The Heaths have come up with six principles of why one idea can be stickier than another. To summarize, they are: Simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion and story.

This may not sound surprising, but the Heaths have done a good job unpacking (as they say in academia) the research behind these abstractions.

We have all heard versions of them before. Be concrete rather than general in what you have to say. Surprise people. Deliver the unexpected.

But wait. What the Heaths don't acknowledge is that some writers, columnists and marketers make a living telling people the same things over and over again. We consumers also value predictability, as we did when we were children. We love to have our prejudices, which we like to call our world views, confirmed, even as we pretend we're open-minded.

But the Heaths are right about the real key to what sticks — passion, real emotion.

Whether you surprise people or not, if you want to create an impression you have to make them feel and react, especially to what's in front of their faces.

When you scare people with tales of death by candy, it sticks, no matter how scant the evidence.

A story is worth a thousand statistics

The Heaths tells us other things we've heard before and sound true: Tell stories rather than dump data on people. Anne Frank's tale is worth all the Holocaust statistics.

But again, I find the right statistics can be quite overpowering, as long as those numbers push emotional buttons. Just look, for example, how Al Gore uses climate change factoids to proclaim his message.

He's a master of the editorial aside — drowning polar bears and sunken coastlines — terror by anecdote with a few numbers thrown in.

But the trickiest of all these sticky principles is, strangely enough, simplicity. Simplicity is deceptive, say the Heaths. It's always elusive.

Simplicity doesn't mean simplemindedness, or reducing what you know to a cliché or a misleading truism. Simplicity has a compactness: It's like all those Mars bars in a packet.

It's very hard to get the drop on the simple. Some of the smartest people I know can't do it. They even feel insulted by the very notion of reducing complexity.

What's simplicity? It's getting the core of an idea. It can be bracing or counterintuitive. The U.S. Army planners have a saying that "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Well, didn't they find out!

The great truth about simplicity is that we're always forgetting it.

Bite to the core

A core idea allows you to prioritize. It tells you what you should and shouldn't do. It also limits your options, which yields great mental clarity.

The Heaths tell the story about "finding the core at Southwest Airlines." In a market filled with failing carriers, Southwest decided its core idea was "We are THE low-fare airline." Everything is measured against this maxim. And they have thirty years of profits to show for it.

You think it's easy to make a simple decision every day? The Heaths point to research, which shows that when you add more information to the mix you can get paralyzed with indecision. For instance, in one study, people were offered two choices: Hearing an interesting lecture or going to the library to study. Eighty per cent picked the lecture.

But add a third element, like watching a foreign film you've always wanted to see and a kind of paralysis took over. Forty per cent decided what the heck, they should study.

The Heaths tell us that "core messages help people avoid bad choices by reminding them of what's important."

That's why knowledgeable, intelligent people or consumers can be easily derailed. The Heaths call this "the curse of knowledge."

I remember Time magazine ran a story on Senator John Kerry, who lost the presidency to a very un-complex George W. Bush. The problem wasn't that Bush had a simple message, but that Kerry kept changing his. He was always on his cell phone, talking to advisers about some new twist and turn. In the process, his core message became lost.

Bill Clinton was lucky to have that smart Southern rascal, James Carville, as his adviser. Carville gave us that famous line: "It's the economy, stupid."

Who doesn't understand the panic of complexity in a world overrun with the stuff? Does that mean that the stupid will inherit the earth? No, it does not.

So be consoled all ye who value real intelligence: Good, simple core ideas do work, as the Heaths point out. It just takes some thinking to figure them out.

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