The Slipping Point
Duncan Watts says there's no such thing as "the tipping point" -- Malcolm Gladwell's idea that a small group of influentials kicks off trends into the gen pop. In Fast Company, Clive Thompson writes:
Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them." The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994--until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred--at the most?") began wearing the shoes.These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. "What we are really saying," he writes, "is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." In modern marketing, this idea--that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends--is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you'll reach everyone else through them, basically for free. Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims "E-Fluentials" can "make or break a brand." According to MarketingVOX, an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billion is spent a year on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at 36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising. That's on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.
Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.
In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo --has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."
Same with Gladwell's book "Blink". A lot of the things that he describes like supernatural powers are just the fluidity that comes with practice... He as much as concedes this in later chapters, but he still gets regarded as a voodoo shaman. A lot of people want to be Malcolm Gladwell when they grow up, presumably because he can get laid at any cocktail party in Manhattan.
Crid at March 10, 2008 2:50 AM
Proof that women don't care about looks anywhere near the way men do.
http://www.internettime.com/images/astdsd2_5.jpg
Amy Alkon at March 10, 2008 5:50 AM
I pay no attention to fashion trends. I know what looks good on me, and I wear it. If I don't like the looks of something in the store, why on earth would I bring it home? I don't understand that mentality - just because "everyone else" is wearing it, doesn't mean that I'm going to! In fact, if "everyone else" is wearing something, I'm more than likely not to wear it, just because I'm not like "everyone else." And damned proud of that. o_O
Flynne at March 10, 2008 5:58 AM
You're the bane of marketers, as am I. I just bought something -- a spring green pashmina...$44, half-price off at a designer resale store. I haven't even been in a regular retail store since Christmas, and only went then because Gregg needed help with his shopping. And before that...I dunno...maybe it was a year. Department stores here have ugly expensive clothes. And I've had the same style since age 13, when I designed and sewed a floor-length, tiered pink skirt out of a bedsheet. Looked great, too. I've graduated from light pink, but otherwise...
Amy Alkon at March 10, 2008 6:13 AM
I havent read the books(so many books, so little time) but I wonder can't it be a bit of both? Sounds dumb, I know, but just babbling here at the keyboard.
I can see how an influential set or group can influence something, and with the herd-like mentality out there it resonates a bit.
I can also see companies sayin hot damn, lets slice, dice and dissect our market and target the movers n shakers. This is IT! EAsy money once we dump enough in the marketing/research contracts. Of course they cling to the theory after sinking so much into it and ignore all other parts of their marketing strategy chasing a small kernel in the chaff. Then they sing the "hucoodanode" song when the market share and profits dive.
This leads my next thought even further astray. What happens in such a hyper culture like ours? Face it, we turn on a dime and cannibalize our in people with as much relish as following the ascent. What happens if they do properly id the target, market to the target, produce to the target and 6 months later populace is puking on the target? BAM!
rsj at March 10, 2008 8:28 AM
What happens if they do properly id the target, market to the target, produce to the target and 6 months later populace is puking on the target? BAM!
Well, hell, that's the price ya pay for free enterprise! o_O
Flynne at March 10, 2008 8:41 AM
Flynne-
I agree with you 100 percent, it is just that so many people/corporations waste so many resources chasing the grail, only to have it blow up.
Especially since the "in" moves so much, so fast.
Seems odd to pin hopes and dreams on what is in, whether you are an ad exec or a teenager when in is out at warp speed.
rsj at March 10, 2008 9:09 AM
I don't know from marketing but there is one company that's done something I see as brilliant in its advertising. Under Armor always shows its T shirts in ads as if the shirt were wrapped around the torso of the buffest guy imaginable. I'm not anywhere near buff but I look at the ads and say, "I'd *like* to look like that." And UA gets a just a little spillover from my desire to wear something that will make "look like that."
I don't know of any other clothing company that displays its wares thus.
BlogDog at March 10, 2008 10:50 AM
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