Burning Down “The Tipping Point”
It’s incredibly ironic that mass acceptance of Gladwell’s The Tipping Point thesis came via a simple, easily repeatable “urban myth”-style story: social trends “tip” to the masses when a handful of influential social dynamos adopt them.
(Anyone who has read the excellent communications guide Made To Stick should be particularly tickled)
I say this (“Gladwell probably is not 100% correct”) for a couple of reasons (and this in spite of my own eager embrace of The Tipping Point):
1. Duncan Watts’s research, as reported in a fair and balanced [not in the Fox News way] article in Fast Company:
”If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one—and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”
Watts’s two main epiphanies: Cascades require word-of-mouth effects, so you need to build a six-degrees effect into an ad campaign; but since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible—and not waste money chasing “important” people…
The ultimate irony of Watts’s research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is … mass marketing. And that is precisely what the wizards of Madison Avenue, presiding over our zillion-channel microniche market, have rejected as obsolete.
Gladwell and others defend themselves well…truly a brilliantly considered article and essential reading for anyone even slightly interested in marketing.
(The points raised in this article also echo an NYT piece written by Watts back in April 2007 called “Is Justin Timberlake A Product Of Cumulative Advantage?”).
2. The theories empirically researched by Watts dovetail with Umair Haque’s critique of the assumed “90/10” nature of “user-generated content”: that only 10% (or 1% or whatever) of people on a given web service will be active contributers (i.e. “prosumers”):
The point is simple: assuming only x% of people will become active prosumers blinds us to a stark reality.
That reality is this: almost everyone is a prosumer of something.
Everyone has just a handful of things they really love. In the very near future,everyone will prosume the things they love.
In this world, worrying about 1% or 10% audience/prosumer ratio is to utterly miss the deeper strategic lesson.
That lesson is to build a deep enough, powerful enough, durable enough connection - an economic relationship driven by emotion, and nurtured by trust - to ignite the latent spark of prosumption, that as recent evidence tells us, lives within every consumer - whether they’re a CEO or a C-grade Myspace chav.
