The Tipping Point Audio

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Summary: Tipping Trends...
Review: So you want to know what causes a trend? It's people. Yeah I know that answer is too simple but here's the thing, people can be divided into several general categories that help you understand how a trend can be started or how they progress. It's all explained in detail.
PS - If you get stuck in the middle of the book and find your attention wandering because of too much talk about Blues Clues and Sesame Street, skip to the next chapter. The most mind boggling information occurs in chapters 1&2 and starting again on page 206 through the end if you're trying to save time.

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Summary: Easy Reading About Trends
Review: If you want to read a bit about how word-of-mouth trends get started and grow, you'll like "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwell says that things spread in popularity due to three factors.

Gladwell says that not all people are equally important in launching a new tread. Rather, there are a few key people called 'connectors' who tend to be very social and outgoing. These connectors have diverse social networks and a significant ability to spread information, trends, and products. Trends and epidemics spread when they are adopted by connectors.

Mavens are another type of people involved in spreading a trend. Mavens are people who like helping people and who take a particular interest in evaluating the quality of products or ideas. Because they are so well-informed about things, mavens are often the first to promote quality products. Mavens might also be the early adopters of trends. Often, Gladwell writes, some maven or connector must modify something to make it more acceptable to the larger population.

With connectors and mavens in place, the next ingredient for a trend to take off is for the message to be memorable or 'sticky.' Some messages don't stick in the minds of those who hear them while other messages do.

The best way to create a 'sticky' message is to test the message. Gladwell discusses children's TV--Sesame Street and a show called Blue's Clues, which were designed from the start to be 'sticky.'

For example, educators tested two skits designed to help children read. Both involved having children read (or see read) the word 'hug.' Each letter was uncovered and the sound it represented made.

Oscar the Grouch wasn't too effective in teaching kids the word. As Oscar read the word, Oscar was waving his hands around and making all sorts of fuss that distracted the children from the task at hand. They weren't concentrating on the word, they were concentrating on Oscar.

Another skit where a more subdued puppet slowly uncovered each letter as he read it proved to be much more effective.

How did Sesame Street producers know whether kids were paying attention to the word? Eye movement photography. The producers strapped little kids into chairs and photographed what part of the television screen they were watching. Gladwell tells us that they were watching Oscar, not the letters. But, with the subdued puppet, the children focused upon the letters.

Gladwell explains that we can only focus upon one thing at a time: "the receptors that process what we see--are clustered in a small region in the very middle of the retina called the fovea."

Gladwell says that eye movement photography is quite important in advertising. He writes: "If you can track where someone's fovea is moving and what they are fixating on... you can tell with extraordinary precision what they are actually looking at and what kind of information they are actually receiving. The people who make television commercials, not surprisingly, are obsessed with eye tracking. If you make a beer commercial with a beautiful model, it would be really important to know whether the average twenty-two-year old male in your target audience fixates only on the model or eventually moves to your can of beer."

So, in case you're wondering why Britney Spears is holding her Pepsi can in some particular location in her Super Bowl ad, now you know! It's based upon the location of the fovea! (How do they direct this stuff? "Hey Britney, move the can a bit lower. It's not quite aligned properly with the fovea." SLAP! Britney slaps the director.)

Do we really want people tracking the movement of our foveas? Remember, this was happening thirty years ago for the nefarious purpose of teaching kids to read. What about today?

We learn some other disturbing things. For example, Cookie Monster was a pitch man for Frito-Lay. If you can't trust the Cookie Monster, who can you trust?

This is what I found deeply disturbing about the attempt to try to create trends and 'social' epidemics. In particular, Gladwell discusses the failure of anti-smoking campaigns targeted to teenagers. Having adults tell teenagers not to smoke in TV commercials didn't work. Go figure!

But, by studying the nature of the mavens and connectors who unintentionally tend to encourage teenagers to smoke, Gladwell suggests that we can aim to prevent smoking from a more powerful position. I don't really like this social engineering. Whose business is it, anyway? Why should taxpayers' money be spent to promote social policies that a small group decides is correct for us? I find this too politically correct and too meddlesome of individual freedoms.

Gladwell's third factor is context. Gladwell argues that the specific context of a situation will have a powerful impact upon whether or not a trend will spread.

It seems Gladwell draws heavily upon the work of Robert Cialdini and his book, "Influence." Many of the same studies are quoted. If you like this book, you'll like that book also.

Overall, I enjoyed reading "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make A Big Difference." But, I'm hesitant to recommend buying the book! How do we know what other little trend-setting tricks Gladwell knows or can bring to bear upon us? "The Tipping Point" is a bestseller...

Peter Hupalo, Author of "Thinking Like An Entrepreneur"

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Summary: A good start
Review: To take it to the next level--one that begins with the chaos science mentioned in the last reveiw--I recommend reading Seven Life Lessons of Chaos by Briggs and Peat. It shows how organic, nonlinear patterns, including "viral growth," affect all human systems: social, economic, philosophical, and even spiritual.

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Summary: Great Relevance
Review: I really enjoyed this book...written in a format that is easy to digest quickly, and contains interesting data that's relevant to so many fields. If you are someone who would like to start an epidemic...of people buying your product, choosing not to smoke, eating healthy, adopting children, recycling...basically any cause you care about...this book will help you understand human behavior on a mass scale better. I've already recommended it to 5 friends/colleagues.

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Summary: What Made This Book Go?
Review: Out of some 100,000 titles (books) published each year, only a few dozen make the bestseller charts. While some books are better than others, only a few go past the Tipping Point.

The Tipping Point for books is when word-of-mouth reaches a critical mass producing acceleration in sales. Advertising rarely produces these results.

This book is a bestseller and somewhere along the line, it had a Tipping Point. I look forward to a revised edition with an Epilogue describing what happened.

Dan Poynter, Author, Publisher.

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Summary: It changed the way that I look at Sesame Street
Review: This book is well written and the concepts presented are easily understood. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in socialogy.

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Summary: Infectious enthusiasm
Review: Malcolm Gladwell has a genius for getting a concept across. I have followed his career in the New Yorker ever since the "Blacks are like boys..." article, and was delighted to pick up his book. The separate segments in this book are strong, as he chronicles various phenomena around his thesis. The one distraction to me was the need to tie all the loose ends together. I would have enjoyed it more as a collection of essays. That said, whether you agree that it all comes together or not, it's an entertaining, edifying read.

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Summary: Circular Reasoning around Old Ideas
Review: The book pulls together a few examples of trends illustrating how small behaviors sometimes shift suddenly from being unpopular to being very popular. These sharp, quick shifts in social life are commonplace, and a host of others have written and talked about it for many years. If you just haven't read and thought much about it before, you might learn from this book. Otherwise, it's a rehash of old ideas wrapped up in some very unenlightened, circular reasoning. If one engaged the author by asking questions aimed at sorting out the theory, the interchange might run something like this.

Question: What causes a sudden new trend in people's behavior?
Answer: Lots of people start doing something that only a few were doing earlier.

Question: That just sounds like the definition of a trend, and what I'm asking is, what actually causes many people to adopt a new behavior?
Answer: They are exposed to a few people already doing it. This experience "sticks" with them so well they adopt the behavior. With enough exposures, and enough stickiness, a chain reaction results. We witness a sudden trend.

Question: Okay, if the change hinges on "stickiness," then how do we identify a sticky behavior, distinguishing it from other behaviors?
Answer: Behavior is sticky if people adopt after they are exposed. Otherwise, it is not sticky, or exposure happened in the wrong context.

Question: How would we identify the wrong context?
Answer: New behaviors don't stick there. No sudden trend.

Question: Let's see if I can sum up what you've told me. One never truly knows what might happen beforehand. But you can certainly tell me after the fact a certain behavior is sticky, and people were exposed to it in the right context, by the fact that a sudden trend occurred?
Answer: Yes.

Question: Your theory really has no predictive value, does it?
Answer: Well, no. Except, I can assure you that some Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen will be involved. They're easy to identify because they do lots of exposing; they carry the epidemic-like trend forward.

Question: If they didn't successfully carry the trend forward, they wouldn't be very good Mavens/Connectors/Salesmen, would they?
Answer: Well, no. But afterwards, once we have spotted the sudden trend, you can bet they'll be there.

And so on . . . . This may be entertaining, but it's not science.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting -- but not heavy -- read
Review: Serious (and even semi-serious) students of marketing, sociology or demographics will likely find the concepts outlined in "The Tipping Point" to be old-hat. But for the rest of us, Malcolm Gladwell's book is an entertaining and insightful read. Gladwell and his book deserve credit for offering some outside-the-box thought about social phenomena ranging from drug abuse to early childhood education to the spread of fashion trends to school shootings. An easy book, "The Tipping Point" is more appropriate for the reader curious about social trends than anyone looking to do in-depth research. However, it's also useful to the businessperson looking for a different way to understand sales and marketing trends.

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Summary: Readable and Interesting, but . . .
Review: Gladwell has an interesting theory and his stories illustrating it are all interesting for what they're worth. It took me a few days to read it, which is fast for me.

However, he is so enthusiastic about his theory that he gets carried away into making it the only way to solve problems. His solution for teen smoking, for example, was to admit kids are going to try it and only a few will really get hooked, so why bother. His theory becomes a template on which too many things are made to fit. It might explain a lot after the fact, but it seems awfully hard to apply practically to plan an "epidemic" in the manner he suggests. You have to find the "connnectors, mavens and salesmen" and then convince them that your idea or product is important, making it "sticky," which sounds much more simple that it really must be.

The real problem is one he acknowledges late in the book: Epidemics run out. People develop immunity if the disease doesn't kill them. "Cool" is a condition that consciously avoids widespread adoption. Things are cool because only an elite few are doing, wearing or reading them. When everyone else gets in on the act, the Cool people have already moved on. So what's the point? If you can master his analysis and plan epidemics, you can be a master marketer, but there is still something artificial and manipulative about it. Maybe that's why this book has become a marketing hit.