The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Summary (from the publisher): The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.

 

Review: The premise of this book is that "ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do" (7) in that they demonstrate three characteristics - "one, contagiousness, two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that changes happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment"(9). Before anything - idea, trend, social behavior - becomes wildly popular or accepted, it has to reach something Gladwell refers to as "the tipping point" or the push it needs to propel it into a wildly contagious epidemic that is a popular bestseller, nationally recognized product, etc. In other words, the tipping point it the boiling point or threshold that changes it from a little known idea or product to a wildly recognized or accepted one.

 

To explore this idea, Gladwell looks at examples of popular "epidemics" such as Hushpuppy shoes, the effectiveness of Paul Revere's nighttime ride, and violence rates in New York City to determine exactly what caused each of these examples to reach the tipping point. His main explanations are the power of the individual - "connectors, mavens, and salesman", the "stickiness factor" or how well people remember and recall what you're selling, and the power of context.

 

Gladwell's book is very entertaining, but I can't help but feel as if he's merely outlining something we already subconsciously know. And his examples make it difficult to argue with his thesis - of course we all agree that Paul Revere must have been quite a persuasive and influential fellow, or we wouldn't still know his name today. And Blue's Clues and Sesame Streets are undeniably popular shows, largely because the show's makers conducted immense research to see how their show would be received by children and how well children paid attention. Gladwell merely piggybacks on their immense research by labeling their ability to command attention by re-naming the show's attraction as the "stickiness factor." Gladwell also seems to cite an awful lot of studies that don't particularly deal with the "tipping point" theory but someone persuade us that his theory is backed by a whole lot of research. For example, Gladwell comments on people's propensity to be less likely to act during an emergency if they're in a large crowd versus a lone bystander; "people who saw smoke seeping out from under a doorway would report it 75 percent of the time when they were on their own, but the incident would be reported only 38 percent of the time when they were in a group" (28). I don't disagree with anything he's saying, but it does feel like the book is largely the work of many others repackaged with new terminology and more expansive generalization of trends.

 

Ultimately, Gladwell concludes that the tipping point can be caused by many local factors; "we are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us" (259). I found his examples extremely persuasive and thought provoking and this book absolutely paints an insightful picture of how and why certain trends caught on, which should help inform strategies for causing the tipping point of other ideas or products. Yet I find myself wondering if his advice is concrete enough to make a practical difference in how we seek that sweet spot or "tipping point" in our own lives or businesses.

 

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