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Summary: Sociology and the Chaos Theory
Review: I found this book in the library and have already bought several copies. It was the best book I read last year. I can't see how it would be helpful from a business perspective, but it was fascinating and well written. I'm always searching for non-fiction that's well researched and un-opinionated. This fit the bill.
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Summary: Three Cardinal Principles
Review: The Tipping Point-Malcolm Gladwell This terrific book isn't really about advertising or footwear although it begins and ends with two seemingly overnight sensations in that category, one of which, Airwalks, he ascribes to advertising, the other, Hush Puppies, he doesn't. (I think he may be wrong there, but more on that later.)
But the reason anyone in advertising or marketing will want to read this book is because Mr. Gladwell does such a good job of deconstructing and explaining how trends or fads or to use the current expression: "buzz" come to be. Drawing from an enormous range of sources, from history to sociology to anthropology and psychology, he ultimately attributes the emergence of the latest, new, new thing to three cardinal principles that no marketer or communicator should be unaware of.
His first law relates to the subject of the audience to which a message should be directed. As he explains, a small group of people he designates as "connectors", "mavens" and "salesmen" play an enormous role in determining if an idea (or product) takes off. This would seem to have an interesting application to how marketers identify their target audience.
His next law arises from his observation that even very subtle changes in how a message is delivered can have a huge impact on its memorability and how likely it is to prompt action. So this would seem to have a big bearing on what an advertiser's message should be.
And finally, he gets to the fact that the context in which a message is delivered can be every bit as important to building momentum as what the message itself is, i.e. how and where you say something is just as critical as what you say.
Three important lessons for anyone interested in changing people's behaviors, which is certainly key to what advertisers and their advertising agencies are interested in. But what about my beef with his Hush Puppies claim? Well, what Gladwell asserts is that Hush Puppies became all the rage after the fashionistas who troll the small stores of New York's lower East Side discovered them sometime around late 1993 or early 1994. No advertising necessary. But what I know is there was some terrific Hush Puppies advertising done around that time. However, when I went back to look for it, I discovered it ran from 1986-1989 and clearly there can't have been a four or five year gap between this advertising and the Hush Puppies craze. Unless...
Unless the great advertising was actually done as a tool to load up the trade (a not uncommon practice in the apparel business), and when the merchandise didn't move (possibly because the media budget was too small) the trade dumped its stock of Hush Puppies on wholesalers who eventually sold them to those small stores on the lower East Side where the trendsetters found them.
Who knows? But this book is well worth reading in any event.
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Summary: A great way to comprehend trends and socal fads
Review: This book is premoted a theory that states that small changes cause great socal change. The idea is that after a certain amount of word of mouth comumication can cause a small trend to become a major fade or social trend. The model is similar to the spread of viruses or disease. This book is about an idea reaching a crital mass that cause a juggernaut of change. The book states three rule how certain poeple are good at connecting poeple, some poeple are excellent educators and some poeple are great salespersons. These poeple can cause a word of mouth fad or socal virus. The book gives excellent case studies and examples of this type of person The second part of the book is about making ideas stick. How small changes in a avertising campaign or idea communication can cause a marked social idea. The final idea is about context effecting socal action. This part of the book describes the causes of the spread of teenage smoking and sucide. A lot of the science is counter intuative and really will suprise most readers. This is an important book for thoses who want to understand the "randomness" of our marketing and social world. As well the book is well researched and compelling with its examples and case studies. It is an easy read I read it on a 10 hour plane ride and it seemed like minutes. As well I wanted to read it again.
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Summary: Instrumental for your small business or start-up
Review: Malcolm Gladwell's excellent work 'The Tipping Point' is ostensibly a social science book. It's laden with references to a wide range of studies involving rats and nicotine, the dynamics of suicide epidemics, teen smoking, the 'Broken Windows' theory of crime, etc., etc. That may sound like rather dry stuff, but trust me: it's not. It's a very compelling read, mostly because this is really a small business/start-up success guide in disguise. Read Gladwell's excellent writing on things such as 'Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.' He's hit upon the key to bootstrapping a business. He even throws in some advice like 'how to construct a Maven trap.' Any small entrepreneur can benefit from these ideas. The challenge is to find out how to adapt them and create an epidemic of your own. That's a thrilling thought.
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Summary: Turns Conventional Wisdom Sideways
Review: Malcolm Gladwell animates an idea that has been entombed in various arcane academic journals, with real-life examples, character studies, and a simple, engaging writing style. He weaves together Paul Revere's ride, teenage smoking, anti-graffiti campaigns, Sesame Street, and the success of best-sellers to create a world where conventional wisdom is turned upside down, and the reason for so many sudden shifts lie in unexpected places. A lot of our world is determined by context and the fortuitous presence of salesman, mavens and connectors - people that accelerated social change. More books should be like this - short, concise, lively, and well-footnoted! My only quibble with this book - and this is not so much of a quibble as an invitation to Mr. Gladwell to write a sequel - is how can we use these findings to make our would a better, safer place? The dominant theme of these first years of the 21st century is the looming threat of international, fundamentalist terrorism. What is the tipping point that could eliminate or decrease this threat, in the same way that the elimination of graffiti and fare-beaters in the New York City subway precipitated a significant overall decrease in violent crime throughout New York City in the 1990s?
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Summary: Change, society, and memetic epidemics
Review: This book is a brilliant combination of memetics, population dynamics, and marketing; using several historical examples (including Paul Revere's ride, Airwalk shoes, and actual disease epidemics) the author clearly explains how things that seem small to begin with can suddenly take over a population's interest. I read this in an evening; couldn't put it down; highly recommended for anyone interested in how marketing affects culture -- or how new ideas can overtake and crush old paradigms.
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Summary: Irresistibly "sticky" -- be a "maven," tell all your friends
Review: I won't go into the contents of this impossible-to-put-down book -- read the editorial reviews or other readers' reviews, or better yet, get a copy and read it yourself. I take issue with some reviewers' disdain for the so-called "dumbed-down" approach this book takes. I am far from "dumb," however neither do I have a degree in marketing, sociology or psychology. I was not looking for a college text full of five-syllable words and terms peculiar to those specialties. Some of these reviewers seem to exhibit a disdain bordering on snobbery for those of us who never heard the words "maven," "collector" or "stickiness" used in Gladwell's context. Pardon me for not being an expert in your specialty; I'm too busy being an expert in my own. Like so many other "pop(ular) psychology" books, this one will take it on the chin from some people precisely because it IS written for the layman. Just because something is put in terms that one can understand without an open dictionary at the elbow is no reason to dismiss it as superficial. There is an enormous amount of information out there that most people, myself included, have neither the time nor inclination to plow through in order to get a working knowledge of the subject. Perhaps the greatest contribution a book like "The Tipping Point" and its ilk can provide is the opportunity for a reader to learn about the existence of concepts that he or she would otherwise never have been exposed to. As a non-specialist in the areas this book touches on, I never would have known about the concepts Gladwell presents had it not been for this book. I agree that this is not a book that someone already steeped in psychology or marketing theory would find particularly illuminating. However, that was obviously not the audience the author intended to reach. He apparently knows more about marketing than some of the reviewers who complain that the book isn't scholarly enough for their taste. As for the book having a disjointed, pieced-together quality, I didn't feel it at all. Nor did I percieve any "padding" that some reviewers felt Gladwell did to make a longer, more profitable product from an article-length concept. From start to finish, I found "The Tipping Point" to be fascinating, well-written and thought-provoking. Buy this book. Then be a "maven" and tell all your friends.
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Summary: NETWORK EXTERNALITY? PAY IT FORWARD? NO, TIPPING POINT
Review: Some voracious reading of research on... (1) "Network externalities" and "network effects" from economics and
(2) WOM (word of mouth) research from social/cognitive psychology ...and shamelessly rehashing them with a doozy touchy-feely spin on "small things can inspire big things" a la "Pay it Forward" (that Helen Hunt/Kevin Spacey rigmarole) -- and lo and behold, you have a tipping point for a book that people are stomping over each other to buy and magically provoke their thinking about marketing or sociological phenomena. Indeed every once in a while we need a business book that summarizes and makes sense of all that goes on in academia, so even such blatant intellectual debauchery would be fine as long as the BASIC professional integrity of attribution was upheld. The very least one can expect from such a self-proclaimed "biography of an idea" endeavour is an honest acknowledgement of WHERE the idea came from. As though it was not embarrassing enough that epithets like "maven" and "connector" are well established in WOM or network externality research since nearly 20 years, we were also fed with the MOST commonly used illustrations -- faxes becoming important because other people had faxes, or some quaint fashion catching up overnight (Hush Puppies in this case, but it could be any number of things), or how broadband has swept our world, or the success of a TV show -- these are all primetime textbook examples to explain the very fundamental concepts of network externality in ECON 101. Some arcane mention of epidemiologists' theories does not count because the whole hypothesis here is to provide something that is "beyond the world of medicine and diseases". Not one mention of the "Network Externality" in the book or in the glossary at the end. To its minor credit, the book is written with a readable flow although expect to have each and every minutiae explained in a "for dummies" style. For e.g., the perfectly simple notion that yawning is visually and aurally contagious is explained over 2 pages of relatively small print with about 100 mentions of the word yawn. Yawn. Such excruciating fleshing out of material is understandable of course, given how little of substance there really was in this "thinking" to begin with. The text wallows in its conflicting logical morass. Remember, "small things" are supposed to make a big difference. A winding 40 pages are devoted to crime combat in NY under a newly appointed police chief. Forgive me if this concerted annual effort by a legitimate full-fledged police force does NOT sound like a "small thing" to me. We are told "What must underlie successful epidemics is a bedrock belief that change is possible". Unfortunately, all the examples Gladwell cites such as a sweeping shoe vogue, faxes becoming popular -- these are all a matter of happenstance instead of a concerted effort by individuals at a point in time. Such is indeed the true nature of contagious phenomenons as he himself mentions at the outset, there is no "bedrock belief" until afterwards when someone sits and analyzes the event. I could also hypothesize that a lot of these mini-revolutions happen when an optimal chain of events is accidentally (unintentionally) spurred on by some triggers in society/environment etc, but that is for another day. As though this were not enough we are treated to semi-pompous implications. For e.g., page 131: "There is something PROFOUNDLY counter-intuitive in the definition of stickiness that emerges from all these examples". Really? Would have been nice if it were apparent instead of having us hit on the head with it. Come to think of it a "big effect" is a pretty flaky/subjective concept anyway. How could this supposed big effect be sustained? Where are hush puppies now? As for NY's crime rate, many experts such as Andrew Karmen from CUNY (John Jay) believe that the drop in crime rates in NY in 1980s or 90s is insignificant, homicides in the city have risen 10-fold since 1950. How about faxes -- and their big effect being eaten by another big effect (email)? What is most piquing though is that in a round-about way we are offered Polyanna solutions as a result of this 3-pronged theory of network externality. One priceless gem emerges when we are convinced how cleaning a subway system would be enough to solve crime rates (with the Bernie Goetz case as a lynchpin). My retorts won't fit this review. Whether this is a legitimate business book or a mere avante-garde coffee table thoughtpiece, one would have at the least expected some sort of an organized framework to plan for these "small things" or to sustain the "big effects". None is forthcoming. As for me, the very fact that well-established research is packaged here in a 250-page drawl as a pretentiously seminal idea is quite a put-off in itself. A simple 5-6 page HBR article would have done the job just fine, but then that wouldn't make a lot of money for Gladwell, would it. If you are in business and hope to use this stuff for a spiral marketing/branding effort, you'd do a lot better getting your hands on some WOM literature than this inchoate theoretical indulgence. Highly over-rated material, this.
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Summary: The Science of Small Worlds in layman's terms--awesome!
Review: The Tipping Point is eminently readable and highly instructive. While it is only a peak (tip?) under the blanket of the whole new science of 'small worlds' and its power, it is exceedinly well written and captivating. I lecture on positvie neworking and commend this book to all my classes. Most audiences have people who have read it and all report having enjoyed it. Well done, Malcolm, and we are waiting for your follow-up work. How about something on the importance of f2f networking and the dangers of relying on email only for effective communications and networking?
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Summary: Sales and Marketing 101...
Review: If you're one of those people wishing to sell or promote a product, Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" is a great place to start. True marketing begins by identifying one's target audience and then tailoring the product's design to meet that core audience's expectations. "The Tipping Point" examines in-depth the aspects that make "viral marketing" or word-of-mouth epidemics explode. The number-one method of product promotion is word-of-mouth, and it's free. People listen to their friends, so this is an important book with concepts marketing professionals need to master. Throughout his book, Gladwell analyzes certain principles that all epidemics have in common. In chapter two, he focuses on three powerful groups of people: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Reaching these groups effectively is essential for any grass-roots campaign, whether you're selling a political candidate or computer software. In addition, the book gives an overview of "stickiness" and the imminent role it plays in successful marketing plans. Small business owners, CEOs, door-to-door salesmen, and artists will find "The Tipping Point" to be one of the best book purchases they've ever made. Read it. Memorize it. Then go out and do your best to implement it. Britt Gillette
Author of "Conquest of Paradise"
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