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

by Malcolm Gladwell

  Consider the field of direct marketing. A company buys an ad in a magazine or sends out a direct mailing with a coupon attached that they want the reader to clip and mail back to them with a check for their product. Reaching the consumer with the message is not the hard part of direct marketing. What is difficult is getting consumers to stop, read the advertisement, remember it, and then act on it. To figure out which ads work the best, direct marketers do extensive testing. They might create a dozen different versions of the same ad and run them simultaneously in a dozen different cities and compare the response rates to each. Conventional advertisers have preconceived ideas about what makes an advertisement work: humor, splashy graphics, a celebrity endorser. Direct marketers, by contrast, have few such preconceptions, because the number of coupons that are mailed back or the number of people who call in on an 800 number in response to a television commercial gives them an objective, iron clad measure of effectiveness. In the advertising world, direct marketers are the real students of stickiness, and some of the most intriguing conclusions about how to reach consumers have come from their work.

  In the 1970s, for example, the legendary direct marketer Lester Wunderman had a showdown with the Madison Avenue firm McCann Erickson over the Columbia Record Club account. Columbia was then—as it is now—one of the largest mail order clubs in the world, and Wunderman had handled the company’s advertising since it was formed in the 1950s. Columbia decided, however, to hire McCann to come up with a series of television commercials to support the direct marketing print ads that Wunderman was creating. These were not late night commercials with a toll free 800 number. They were standard television spots designed simply to raise awareness. Understandably, Wunderman was upset. He had handled the Columbia account for twenty years and didn’t like the idea of losing even a small part of the business to a competitor. Nor was he convinced that McCann’s advertising would actually do Columbia any good. To settle the issue, he proposed a test. Columbia, he said, should run a full complement of the advertising created by his firm in the local editions of TV Guide and Parade magazine in twenty six media markets around the United States. In thirteen of those markets, McCann should be allowed to air its “awareness” television commercials. In the other thirteen, Wunderman would air his own set of television commercials. Whoever’s commercials created the greatest increase in response to the local TV Guide and Parade advertising would win the whole account. Columbia agreed, and after a month they tabulated the results. Responses in Wunderman’s markets were up 80 percent, compared to 19.5 percent for McCann. Wunderman had won in a rout.

  The key to Wunderman’s success was something he called the “treasure hunt.” In every TV Guide and Parade ad, he had his art director put a little gold box in the corner of the order coupon. Then his firm wrote a series of TV commercials that told the “secret of the Gold Box.” Viewers were told that if they could find the gold box in their issues of Parade and TV Guide, they could write in the name of any record on the Columbia list and get that record free. The gold box, Wunderman theorized, was a kind of trigger. It gave viewers a reason to look for the ads in TV Guide and Parade. It created a connection between the Columbia message viewers saw on television and the message they read in a magazine. The gold box, Wunderman writes, “made the reader/viewer part of an interactive advertising system. Viewers were not just an audience but had become participants. It was like playing a game....The effectiveness of the campaign was startling. In 1977, none of Columbia’s ads in its extensive magazine schedule had been profitable. In 1978, with Gold Box television support, every magazine on the schedule made a profit, an unprecedented turnaround.”

  What’s interesting about this story is that by every normal expectation McCann should have won the test. The gold box idea sounds like a really cheesy idea. Columbia was so skeptical of it that it took Wunderman several years to persuade them to let him try it. McCann, meanwhile, was one of the darlings of Madison Avenue, a firm renowned for its creativity and sophistication. Furthermore, McCann spent four times as much as Wunderman on media time. They bought prime time slots for their space. Wunderman’s ads were on in the wee hours of the morning. In the last chapter, I talked about how epidemics are, in part, a function of how many people a message reaches, and by that standard McCann was way ahead. McCann did all the big things right. But they didn’t have that little final touch, that gold box, that would make their message stick.

  If you look closely at epidemic ideas or messages, as often as not the elements that make them sticky turn out to be as small and as seemingly trivial as Wunderman’s gold box. Consider, for example, the so called fear experiments conducted by the social psychologist Howard Levanthal in the 1960s. Levanthal wanted to see if he could persuade a group of college seniors at Yale University to get a tetanus shot. He divided them up into several groups, and gave all of them a seven page booklet explaining the dangers of tetanus, the importance of inoculation, and the fact that the university was offering free tetanus shots at the campus health center to all interested students. The booklets came in several versions. Some of the students were given a “high fear” version, which described tetanus in dramatic terms and included color photographs of a child having a tetanus seizure and other tetanus victims with urinary catheters, tracheotomy wounds, and nasal tubes. In the “low fear” version, the language describing the risks of tetanus was toned down, and the photographs were omitted. Levanthal wanted to see what impact the different booklets had on the students’ attitudes toward tetanus and their likelihood of getting a shot.

  The results were, in part, quite predictable. When they were given a questionnaire later, all the students appeared to be well educated about the dangers of tetanus. But those who were given the high fear booklet were more convinced of the dangers of tetanus, more convinced of the importance of shots, and were more likely to say that they intended to get inoculated. All of those differences evaporated, however, when Levanthal looked at how many of the students actually went and got a shot. One month after the experiments, almost none of the subjects—a mere 3 percent—had actually gone to the health center to get inoculated. For some reason, the students had forgotten everything they had learned about tetanus, and the lessons they had been told weren’t translating into action. The experiment didn’t stick. Why not?

  If we didn’t know about the Stickiness Factor, we probably would conclude that something was wrong with the way the booklet explained tetanus to the students. We might wonder whether trying to scare them was the appropriate direction to take, whether there was a social stigma surrounding tetanus that inhibited students from admitting that they were at risk, or perhaps that medical care itself was intimidating to students. In any case, that only 3 percent of students responded suggested that there was a long way to go to reach the goal. But the Stickiness Factor suggests something quite different. It suggests that the problem probably wasn’t with the overall conception of the message at all, and that maybe all the campaign needed was a little gold box. Sure enough, when Levanthal redid the experiment, one small change was sufficient to tip the vaccination rate up to 28 percent. It was simply including a map of the campus, with the university health building circled and the times that shots were available clearly listed.

  There are two interesting results of this study. The first is that of the 28 percent who got inoculated, an equal number were from the high fear and the low fear group. Whatever extra persuasive muscle was found in the high fear booklet was clearly irrelevant. The students knew, without seeing gory pictures, what the dangers of tetanus were, and what they ought to be doing. The second interesting thing is that, of course, as seniors they must have already known where the health center was, and doubtless had visited it several times already. It is doubtful that any of them would ever actually have used the map. In other words, what the tetanus intervention needed in order to tip was not an avalanche of new or additional information. What it needed was a subtle but significant change in presentation. The students
needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk—a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career—to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable.

  There are enormous implications in Levanthal’s fear experiments and Wunderman’s work for Columbia Records for the question of how to start and tip social epidemics. We have become, in our society, overwhelmed by people clamoring for our attention. In just the past decade, the time devoted to advertisements in a typical hour of network television has grown from six minutes to nine minutes, and it continues to climb every year. The New York–based firm Media Dynamics estimates that the average American is now exposed to 254 different commercial messages in a day, up nearly 25 percent since the mid 1970s. There are now millions of web sites on the Internet, cable systems routinely carry over 50 channels of programming, and a glance inside the magazine section of any bookstore will tell you that there are thousands of magazines coming out each week and month, chock full of advertising and information. In the advertising business, this surfeit of information is called the “clutter” problem, and clutter has made it harder and harder to get any one message to stick. Coca Cola paid $33 million for the rights to sponsor the 1992 Olympics, but despite a huge advertising push, only about 12 percent of TV viewers realized that they were the official Olympic soft drink, and another 5 percent thought that Pepsi was the real sponsor. According to a study done by one advertising research firm, whenever there are at least four different 15 second commercials in a two and a half minute commercial time out, the effectiveness of any one 15 second ad sinks to almost zero. Much of what we are told or read or watch, we simply don’t remember. The information age has created a stickiness problem. But Levanthal and Wunderman’s examples suggest that there may be simple ways to enhance stickiness and systematically engineer stickiness into a message. This is a fact of obvious importance to marketers, teachers, and managers. Perhaps no one has done more to illustrate the potential of this kind of stickiness engineering, however, than children’s educational television, in particular the creators of Sesame Street and, later, the show it inspired, Blue’s Clues.

  2.

  Sesame Street is best known for the creative geniuses it attracted, people like Jim Henson and Joe Raposo and Frank Oz, who intuitively grasped what it takes to get through to children. They were television’s answer to Beatrix Potter or L. Frank Baum or Dr. Seuss. But it is a mistake to think of Sesame Street as a project conceived in a flash of insight. What made the show unusual, in fact, was the extent to which it was exactly the opposite of that—the extent to which the final product was deliberately and painstakingly engineered. Sesame Street was built about a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them.

  This may seem obvious, but it isn’t. Many critics of television, to this day, argue that what’s dangerous about TV is that it is addictive, that children and even adults watch it like zombies. According to this view, it is the formal features of television—violence, bright lights, loud and funny noises, quick editing cuts, zooming in and out, exaggerated action, and all the other things we associate with commercial TV—that hold our attention. In other words, we don’t have to understand what we are looking at, or absorb what we are seeing, in order to keep watching. That’s what many people mean when they say that television is passive. We watch when we are stimulated by all the whizzes and bangs of the medium. And we look away, or turn the channel, when we are bored.

  What the pioneering television researchers of the 1960s and 1970s—in particular, Daniel Anderson at the University of Massachusetts—began to realize, however, is that this isn’t how preschoolers watch TV at all. “The idea was that kids would sit, stare at the screen, and zone out,” said Elizabeth Lorch, a psychologist at Amherst College. “But once we began to look carefully at what children were doing, we found out that short looks were actually more common. There was much more variation. Children didn’t just sit and stare. They could divide their attention between a couple of different activities. And they weren’t being random. There were predictable influences on what made them look back at the screen, and these were not trivial things, not just flash and dash.” Lorch, for instance, once reedited an episode of Sesame Street so that certain key scenes of some of the sketches were out of order. If kids were only interested in flash and dash, that shouldn’t have made a difference. The show, after all, still had songs and Muppets and bright colors and action and all the things that make Sesame Street so wonderful. But it did make a difference. The kids stopped watching. If they couldn’t make sense of what they were looking at, they weren’t going to look at it.

  In another experiment, Lorch and Dan Anderson showed two groups of five year olds an episode of Sesame Street. The kids in the second group, however, were put in a room with lots of very attractive toys on the floor. As you would expect, the kids in the room without the toys watched the show about 87 percent of the time, while the kids with the toys watched only about 47 percent of the show. Kids are distracted by toys. But when they tested the two groups to see how much of the show the children remembered and understood, the scores were exactly the same. This result stunned the two researchers. Kids, they realized, were a great deal more sophisticated in the way they watched than had been imagined. “We were led to the conclusion,” they wrote, “that the five year olds in the toys group were attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they looked at what for them were the most informative parts of the program. This strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.”

  If you take these two studies together—the toys study and the editing study—you reach quite a radical conclusion about children and television. Kids don’t watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. If you are in the business of educational television, this is a critical difference. It means if you want to know whether—and what—kids are learning from a TV show, all you have to do is to notice what they are watching. And if you want to know what kids aren’t learning, all you have to do is notice what they aren’t watching. Preschoolers are so sophisticated in their viewing behavior that you can determine the stickiness of children’s programming by simple observation.

  The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. When the Children’s Television Workshop was founded in the late 1960s, Palmer was a natural recruit. “I was the only academic they could find doing research on children’s TV,” he says, with a laugh. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic advisers was actually reaching the show’s viewers. It was a critical task. There are those involved with Sesame Street who say, in fact, that without Ed Palmer the show would never have lasted through the first season.

  Palmer’s innovation was something he called the Distracter. He would play an episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds. “We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine,” said Palmer. “We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea.” Preschoolers would then be brought into the room, two at a time, and told to watch the television show. Palmer and his assistants would sit slightly to the side, with a pencil and paper, quietly noting when the children were watching Sesame Street and when they lost interest and looked, instead,
at the slide show. Every time the slide changed, Palmer and his assistants would make a new notation, so that by the end of the show they had an almost second by second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers’ attention and what parts did not. The Distracter was a stickiness machine.

  “We’d take that big sized chart paper, two by three feet, and tape several of those sheets together,” Palmer says. “We had data points, remember, for every seven and a half seconds, which comes to close to four hundred data points for a single program, and we’d connect all those points with a red line so it would look like a stock market report from Wall Street. It might plummet or gradually decline, and we’d say whoa, what’s going on here. At other times it might hug the very top of the chart and we’d say, wow, that segment’s really grabbing the attention of the kids. We tabulated those Distracter scores in percentages. We’d have up to 100 percent sometimes. The average attention for most shows was around 85 to 90 percent. If the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around fifty, they’d go back to the drawing board.”

  Palmer tested other children’s shows, like the Tom and Jerry cartoons, or Captain Kangaroo, and compared what sections of those shows worked with what sections of Sesame Street worked. Whatever Palmer learned, he fed back to the show’s producers and writers, so they could fine tune the material accordingly. One of the standard myths about children’s television, for example, had always been that kids love to watch animals. “The producers would bring in a cat or an anteater or an otter and show it and let it cavort around,” Palmer says. “They thought that would be interesting. But our Distracter showed that it was a bomb every time.” A huge effort went into a Sesame Street character called the Man from Alphabet, whose specialty was puns. Palmer showed that kids hated him. He was canned. The Distracter showed that no single segment of the Sesame Street format should go beyond four minutes, and that three minutes was probably optimal. He forced the producers to simplify dialogue and abandon certain techniques they had taken from adult television. “We found to our surprise that our preschool audience didn’t like it when the adult cast got into a contentious discussion,” he remembers. “They didn’t like it when two or three people would be talking at once. That’s the producers’ natural instinct, to hype a scene by creating confusion. It’s supposed to tell you that this is exciting. The fact is that our kids turned away from that kind of situation. Instead of picking up on the signal that something exciting is going on, they picked up on the signal that something confusing is going on. And they’d lose interest.