Sep
3
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference – Captured – Malcolm Gladwell
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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Epidemics can rise and fall in one dramatic moment. That dramatic moment is the Tipping Point. There are social and viral epidemics. This book is concerned with the epidemics spread by people.
There are three rules to the Tipping Point.
1. The law of the few (Connectors, Mavens and Sellers)
2. The stickiness factor.
3. The power of context.
1. The law of the few
Paul Revere, on his famous ride informing “The British are coming!,” had a partner and fellow revolutionary, William Dawes, who rode with him on a separate route. Dawes headed for Lexington through the towns west of Boston, but he didn’t successfully gather the support that Revere did. Everywhere Revere went, his initial word to the towns spread like wildfire. Paul Revere, says Gladwell, was a Connector and a Maven. His message, the same message as Dawe’s, had far more impact because of it.
Connectors:
- Know everyone.
- Have unusual gift for rapidly making new friendships and acquaintances.
- Gladwell took 200 random names from the phonebook and asked people how many surnames were shared by people they knew. Connectors said 80-100+. Average was 21. My response was 26 :). I’m obviously not a connector yet.
- Roger Horchow airplane ride convinced Gladwell that some just have a gift.
- Important because of the sheer quantity of people they know.
Mavens:
- These folks know everything about a particular area.
- Airwalk hired a fashion Maven, on the edge with everything hip, to “Tip” their shoes into a larger market moving the company from $15 million to $175 million in two years.
- Mavens are valued for what they know. They are trusted by everyone because everyone knows that they know.
- Most likely to pass around deals and coupons.
- They are not persuaders.
Sellers:
- These people have an innate ability to persuade.
- ABC’s polls always favored Reagan more than other candidates because Peter Jennings unknowingly lighted up when he spoke of Reagan. He had the ability to persuade even though people didn’t know they were being persuaded.
2. The Stickiness Factor
An epidemic will grow or stop growing because of how much it sticks. The most popular children shows on TV: Seasame Street and Blues Clues demonstrate the importance of the stickiness factor.
- Seasame Street The folks at Seasame Street found the show on the premise that keeping a child’s attention was equivalent to them learning. They saw the success of commercials and patterned Seasame Street in short, 3-4 minute segments. They almost failed because the childhood experts told them not to combine realty with the muppets. But adding Big Bird to the street kept children’s attention far better. They determined the attention level of each program after they developed the distractor system to which was a slide show of interesting images that would compete with the program for attention. Whenever the children looked at the distractor, they assumed that part of the show wasn’t holding attention. They shot for 90% attention. Seasame Street was a huge success because it was sticky. They later learned from eye movement studies how to increase the amount of learning that took place on the show. If the muppets were too distracting, the children only paid attention to them.
- Blues Clues This show out did Seasame Street because they took 30 more years of child research and improved the show. Short segments aren’t as successful as story lines for children. Children love interactivity. They also love repetition. Blues Clues repeats the same show 5 times, but has enough depth that children love to watch it over and over. It may be the stickiest children’s show of all time. It beat Seasame Street because it focused on children and not on adults like Seasame Street.
3. The Power of Context
- New York Crime Example of the New York drop in crime rate because they repainted the subway cars faster than the gangs could grifiti them. They also put people in jail for trying to get onto the subway free or peeing in the streets. They stopped the little things and the murder rates and horrible crime dropped 60 percent in the area. Bernie Goetz drove these changes. Soon after New York put him in charge of the police department for the entire city and he turned the city crime rate around by 40 percent.
- The magic number of 150 In the army, in hunter gatherer societies, in the gore corporation and in Methodist churches (Divine Secrets of Ya-Ya Sisterhood moves to the Bestseller list overnight in San Francisco and the book clubs), 150 people tend to be the largest size you can get a group and have it actually act together as one voice, in unity without more complex structures of organization
Tipping Points can be caused or prevented. AirWalk shoes orchestrated a Tipping Point for their shoes. They can be deadly. Micronesian suicide rates show a Tipping Point among the teenage boys. Teenage smoking, in spite of the efforts to fight it, is still on the rise even though teens know that it’s not good for them. Teens choose to smoke to rebel and be cool like people they see smoking. They don’t want to hear adults tell them it’s bad for them. Some think people some smoke because it provides a drug to deal with depression. Treating depression may reduce smoking problems. There is a point when an occasional smoker “Tips” and becomes a chain smoker when they have sufficient levels of nicotene. Gladwell thinks it would be possible to stop the Tipping Point from moving to chain smokers by reducing the nicotene content so that they can never get enough nicotene.
Interestingly, in the afterword, Gladwell says the difficult challenge to cause a Tipping Point is to find the Mavens. They are more difficult to find. When Ivory soap places an 800 number for questions on their soap, it’s a Maven trap. No one but Mavens call those numbers. Connectors make it their business to find you. You don’t need to find them. Another example, Lexus, when they had to call back a large group of cars, was worried because they had marketed their perfection and reliability. They recalled the cars and while the owners waited, Lexus washed them and filled them with gas. Owners who lived 100 miles away from a shop received a visit from the mechanic at their home. Lexus even flew to one place to fix the car. This pleased the newest owners of Lexus so much. Plus these new enthusiasts were Mavens. They turned around and marketed Lexus for the company. It was the most impactful callback ever- impactful for the benefit of the company. There are ways to find the Mavens or get them to come to you.