THE TIPPING POINT (HOW LITTLE THINGS CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE)



 

INTRODUCTION:

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.