Introduction:
‘The Tipping Point’ by Malcolm Gladwell was first published in the year 2000. ‘The Tipping Point’ is a biography of an idea. Tipping point is a moment of the critical mass, the threshold and the boiling point. Surpassing this threshold point creates vast changes. Gladwell explains this moment shift with the examples of tremendous increase in sales of Hush Puppies shoes in 1994-1995, sudden fall of crime rate after 1990 in New York City and spreading of HIV virus.
The Three Rules of Epidemics:
Gladwell uses all of these examples to illustrate what he defines as the three principles of social epidemics: the law of the few, the stickiness factor, and the power of context. The Hush puppies is an example of the law of the few where one of the exceptional people with a large social connection found about this trend and spread the message across. He uses ‘Winston tip cigarettes’ to explain the stickiness factor, a message that you can’t get it off your head. And finally a crime scene to explain power of context that shows people are sensitive to their environment.
The Law of the Few:
The ‘Law of the Few’ has many commonalities with the 80/20 principle. 80/20 signifies that 80% of the influence is created by 20% of the people. If we look at the pyramid of influence the law of the few is about the trend-setters and early adopters influencing a greater mass.
The first kind of people the author describes is called Connectors. Connectors have a huge social influence due to their larger social circles. Influence of these connectors is illustrated by citing Milgram’s experiments in small world problem. Milgram’s experiment shows that all the people in this world are separated by just six degrees of separation. In today’s context, Connectors play an important role in deciding the fate of social networking sites.
The second type of people is Mavens. Mavens are the early adopters. They have a huge knowledge of the Market place. These people are kind of opinion leaders for us in our day to day life. We take the advice of Mavens before any purchase. And final type is the ‘Salesman’, a person who can persuade you with his negotiation skills. Gladwell explains this with the example of Tom Gau who sells financial services and Peter Jennings.
The Stickiness Factor:
Stickiness Factor means creating a message that keeps playing in your mind. Gladwell explains the stickiness factor with the Sesame street example. Though, television was perceived as a low-involvement product for teaching; Sesame used their creative teaching methods and made television sticky for the children. Blue’s Clue is another quoted example in the book for the stickiness factor.
Stickiness factor plays a major role in direct marketing for the job is make the consumer to remember your advertisement out of the other hundred other advertisements. Gladwell cities Lester Wunderman who was successful in creating the stickiness factor in his direct marketing program through the use of ‘secret of Gold Box’ campaign.
The Power of Context (Part One):
Gladwell's third principal is the power of context, the notion that epidemics are sensitive to the context, or the time and place, in which they occur. Power of context is equally important as the other two principles as shown in the Goetz case. Goetz case shows the encounter of four young black youths with criminal records by an angry subway rider in 1984 when the crime rate was high. Today such incidents wouldn’t happen due to the change in context. To explain the power of context Gladwell points to something called the Broken Windows theory. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge.
The Power of Context (Part Two):
This chapter deals with the cognitive philosophy called channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kind of information. The most interesting limits in the channel capacity is the social channel capacity, the number of people with whom we can have a genuine social relationship. This number is pegged at 150 for the humans based on historical studies. ‘The rule of 150’ suggests that size is another contextual factor. The size of functional fighting units in army should be 150 or less beyond which people do not familiarize with each other. Does it still hold in the social networking world? We have to wait and watch.
Case Study – Rumours, Sneakers and Translation:
The case study is about the rise and fall of Airwalk shoes. Though, the brand initially targeted the skateboarding subculture of Southern California they wanted national brand name recognition. They hired an advertising agency and succeeded by understanding the variables that influence the public’s perception of coolness. Their avatars of coolness, such as Tibetan Buddhism, Pachuco gang culture positioned their shoes as cool footwear. But, when Airwalk cut their product line into single line of shoes and decreased their product breadth it lead to their decline.
Case-Study – Suicide, Smoking and the search for unsticky cigarette:
This case draws a relationship between the suicides among adolescent males in Micronesia and the teen cigarette smokers in the United States. Both trends were predicated upon two main factors. First, teenagers imitate others and try on new behaviours and attitudes during adolescence. Second, it is the Mavens who engage in early cigarette smoking or suicide and as they are like opinion leaders other emulate them.
Conclusion:
The author summarizes the preceding seven chapters. He believes that the difficulty and volatility of the Tipping world can also generate a large measure of hopefulness. By manipulating the size of groups, tinkering with presentations we can dramatically improve the receptivity and stickiness factor respectively. Gladwell concludes ‘With the slightest push in just the right place the world can be tipped’.
