Is the Tipping Point Toast?
From Fast Company:
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 (NASDAQ:YHOO) –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. (much more…)
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