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Owen Baxer & Geoffrey Lewis
(Hush Puppies Executives)
The shoe passed certain point of
popularity & then tipped.
Products & services, ideas
& trends should be thought of as epidemics.
If products & services are
contagious, there will certainly be a tipping.
The second distinguishing
characteristics of the Hush Puppies & the New York’s crime rate are that in
both cases the little changes had big effects.
All of the possible reasons for
why the New York’s crime rate dropped are changes that happed at that margin;
they were incremental changes.
Of these three characteristics-
one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and
three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment. The third
trait is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of
the first two and that permits the greatest insights into why modern change
happens the way it does. The name given to that one dramatic moment in an
epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.
To appreciate the power of
epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need
to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from
small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.
The Tipping Point is the moment
of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.
The world of Tipping Point is a
place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than
possibility. It is- contrary to all our expectations- a certainty.
Above all, why is it that some
ideas or behaviours or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what we
do to deliberately start and control an epidemic of our own.
CHAPTER 1- THE THREE
RULES OF EPIDEMICS
The mid- 1990 story about the
city of Baltimore’s with regard to the increase in rate of syphilis in the
city.
There were three possible causes
of the increase in the rate of syphilis which were- sudden increase in crack
(drug) deal; the breakdown of medical services in the city’s poorest
neighbourhoods; the demolition of public housing especially that of Lexington
Terrace in West Baltimore & Lafeyette courts in East Baltimore.
It takes only the smallest
changes to shatter an epidemic equilibrium.
There are there agents of change
(tipping) - the law, stickiness factor, and the power of context.
1. The
Law of Few- some people matter than others:- 80/20 economists notion in
relationship with the gonorrhea epidemic in Colorado springs; examples in the mid- 1990s, in the pool halls and
roller skating rinks of East St. Louis, Missouri (called Darnell “Boss Man” or
Mc Gee; James Town, New York (called Nushawn Williams, “Face”, “Sly” &
“shyteek” etc
Social epidemics are driven by
the efforts of a handful of exceptional people who are set apart by how
sociable they are, or how energetic or knowledgeable or influential among their
peers.
Epidemics tip because of the extraordinary
efforts of a few select carriers. But they also sometimes tip when something
happens to transform the epidemic agent itself.
2. The
law of Stickiness: - The flu epidemic of 1918; the 1950s, Swedish Barracks
special ward for underweight or premature infants PCP (Pneumocystis Carinii
Pneumonia) story; Winston fitter-tip cigarettes’ introduction in the spring of
1954. We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make messages more
contagious- how to reach as many people as possible with our products or ideas.
But the hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a
message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other. Stickiness means messages make
an impact.
3. The
power of context: - The 1964 stabbing death of a young Queen’s woman (Kitty
Genovese) witnessed by 38 neighbours.
The power of context says that
human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.
CONCLUSION
The three rules of the Tipping
Point- the law of the few, the stickiness factors, the Power of context- after
a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to
go about reaching a Tipping Point.
CHAPTER 2, THE LAW OF
THE FEW
The American Revolution in the
afternoon of April 18, 1775 in Boston the (Paul Revere & William Daves).
The success of any kind of social
epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular
& rare set of social gifts. These few are called connectors, Mavens, and
salesmen.
The late 1960’s experiment conducted
by psychologist Stanley Miligram small-world problem (how are human beings
connected?)
The six degrees of separation
experiment at Omaha, Nebraska to Boston.
A group of psychologists asked
people living in the Dyckman public housing project in Northern Manhattan to
name their closest friends in the project, 88 percent of their friends lived in
the same building, and half lived on the same floor. PROXIMITY OVERPOWERED
SIMILARITY.
A study,, done on students at the
University of Utah. We are friends with people that we share similar
activities.
Acquaintance survey: - Connectors
are important for more than simply the number of people they know. Their
importance is also a function of the kinds of people they know. What makes
someone a connector? The first- and most obvious- criterion is that connectors
know lots of people. They are the kinds of people who know everyone.
The 250 surnames Test:
I.
The Freshman World Civilization class at City
College in Manhattan, students in their late teens and early 20s had an average
of 20.96, meaning they know about 21 people with the same last name as people
of the list.
II.
A group of highly educated people with Ph.Ds in
their 40s & 50s and wealthy scored 39.
A “weak tie” is a friendly yet
casual social connection.
A very good example of the way
connectors function in the work of sociologist Mark Granovetter. In his classic
1974 study, Getting A Job, Granovetter looked at several hundreds of
professional & technical workers from the Boston suburb of Newton,
interviewing them in some detail on their employment history. He found out that
56% of those he talked to found their through a personal connection. Another
18.8 percent used formal means- advertisements, headhunters and roughly 20%
applied directly. He found out that of those personal connections, the majority
of them were “weak ties”. 16.7% saw the contact often, 55.6% saw the contact
only occasionally, 28% saw the contact rarely. People weren’t getting their
jobs through their friends; they were getting it through ACQUAINTANCES. Your
acquaintances, on the other hand, by definition occupy a very different world
than you do. They are much more likely to know something you don’t know.
The closer an idea or product
comes to a connector, the more power and opportunity it has as well. It will be
a mistake however, to think that connectors are the only social epidemic. It is
possible that connectors learn about new information by an entirely random
process, that because they know so many people they get access to new things
wherever they pop up.
CHAPTER 3, THE
STICKINESS FACTOR
In the late 1960s, a television
producer named Joan Ganz Cooney set out to start an epidemic. Her target was
three-, four-, and five year-olds. Her agent of infection was television, and
the “virus” she wanted to spread was literacy. She intended to give children
from disadvantage homes a leg up once they began elementary school, spreading
pro-learning values from parents, and lingering long enough to have an impact
well after the children stopped watching the show. What she wanted to do, in
essence, was create a learning epidemic to counter the prevailing epidemics of
poverty & literacy. She called her idea SESAME STREET.
Cooney, Lesser & Lloyd
Morrisett of Markel foundation in New York, through Sesame street, they taught
children about their own emotions. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned
how to make TV sticky.
One critical factor in epidemics
is the nature of the messenger. In epidemics, the messenger matters- messengers
are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And
the specific quality that the message has to be successful is the quality of “stickiness.”
The message should be so memorable that it can create change that can spur someone
to action.
The Maxim is the advertising
business. Conventional advertisers have preconceived about what makes an
advertisement work: humour, splashy graphics, a celebrity endoser. In the
advertisement world, direct marketers are the real students reach consumers
have come from their work.
1970s, the legendary direct
marketer Lester Wunderman & McCann Erickson’s competition over Columbia
Records- “secret of the Gold Box”.
The gold box, Wunderman writes
that what made the reader/viewer part of an interactive advertising system.
Viewers were not just an audience but had become participants. It was like
playing a game…….
In 1978, with Gold Box television
support, every magazine on the schedule made a profit, an unprecedented
turnaround. Epidemics are in part, a function of how many people a message
reaches. McCann did all the big things right. But they didn’t have that little
final touch, that gold box that would make their message stick.
The fear experiment conducted by
the social psychologist Howard Leventhal in the 1960s.
The lesson of stickiness is the
same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right
circumstances can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.
CHAPTER 4, THE POWER OF
CONTEXT (PART 1)
On December 22, 1984, the
Saturday before Christmas, Bernhard Goetz’s story in the subway in the
Greenwich Village.
Epidemics are sensitive to the
conditions and circumstances of the place and time in which they occur. In
Baltimore, syphilis spreads far more in the summer than in the winter. Hush
puppies took off because they were being worn by kids in the cutting-edge
precincts of the East village- an environment that helped others to look at the
shoes in a new light. It could be argued that the success of Paul Rivere’s ride-
in some way- owed itself to the fact that it was made at night.
“In a situation like this, you’re
in a combat situation,” Goetz told his neighbor Myra Friedman, in an anguished
telephone call just days after the shooting. “You are not thinking in a normal
way. Your memory isn’t even working normally.
THE POWER OF CONTEXT
(PART TWO)
Rebecca Wells Divine Secrets of
the Ya-ya sisterhood. The initial amount of copies sold were 18,000 then
increasing to 30,000 early summers then to 60,000 copies. Later on when
advertisement was introduced as a means to increase sales in 1998, it increased
to 2.5 million copies. The success of Ya-ya is a tribute to the power of
context, which is the critical role that groups play in social epidemics.
The spread of any new and contagious
ideology has a lot to do with the skillful use of group power.
CHAPTER SIX, CASE STUDY
The Airwalk story in the mid-
1980s. It sponsored professional skate boarders, and developed a cult following
at the skate events, and after a few years had built up a comfortable $ 13
million-a-year business. In the 1990s, they diversified, 1993- $16 million,
1994- $44 million, 1995- $150 million, 1996- $175 million. At the peak, Airwalk
was ranked 3rd behind Nike, Adidas. It
tipped at mid-1990s. At its peak, Airwalk tipped because Lambesis came up with
an inspired advertising campaign. At the start, working with only a small
budget, the creative director of Lambesis, chad Farmer, came up with a series
of dramatic images- single photograph showing the Airwalk user relating to his
shoes in some weird way.
Bruce Yarn and Neal Gross’s
diffusion studies of hybrid seed corn at Greene County in Iowa, in the 1930s. The
innovators, the adventurous ones & the early adopters who were the opinion
leaders in the community. They caught the seed virus and passed it on, finally,
to the Laggards, the most traditional of all, who see no urgent reason to
change. If you plot that progression on a graph, it forms a perfect epidemic
curve- starting slowing, tipping just as the early adopters start using the
seed, then rising sharply as the majority catches on, and falling away at the
end when the Laggards come straggling in.
The message here- new seeds- were
highly contagious & powerfully sticky. A farmer, after all, could see with
his own eyes, from spring planting to fall harvest, how much better the new
seeds were than the old. It’s hard to imagine how that particular innovation
couldn’t have tipped. But in many cases the contagious spread of a new is
actually quite tricky.
The first two groups- the
innovators & early adopters- are visionaries. They want revolutionary
change, something that sets them apart qualitatively from their computers.
What mavens and Connectors and
Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a
way that the extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that
the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning. If anyone wants to start
an epidemic, then- weather it is of shoes or behavior or a piece of software-
he or she has to somehow employ connectors, mavens, and Salesmen in this very
way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message
of the innovators into something the rest of us can understand.
CHAPTER SEVEN, CASE
STUDY
Sima, a seventeen year old boy
who lived with his family at his grandfather’s house of the South Pacific Islands
of Micronesia committed suicide with a pen knife which he collected from
someone on his way in search of the pen knife which his father sent him out
for.
CONCLUSION
Sadler a nurse in Georgia and her
campaign to increase the knowledge & awareness of diabetes and breast
cancer in the black community in San Diego.
Over the course of The Tipping
Point and the stories we have seen, what they all have in common is their
modesty.
The first lesson of the Tipping
Point in starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key
areas.
The Law of the Few starts that
connectors, Mavens, & Salesmen are responsible for starting word-of-mouth
epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word-of-mouth
epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on those three groups-
no one else matters.
The second lesson of the Tipping
Point (the world- much as want it to- does not accord with our institution). They
who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think
is right- they deliberately test their intuition.
What must underline successful
epidemics, in the end is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people
can radically transform their behavior or belief in the face of the right kind
of impetus.
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