The Tipping Point

by Malcolm Gladwell

  Moore’s argument is that the attitude of the Early Adopters and the attitude of the Early Majority are fundamentally incompatible. Innovations don’t just slide effortlessly from one group to the next. There is a chasm between them. All kinds of high tech products fail, never making it beyond the Early Adopters, because the companies that make them can’t find a way to transform an idea that makes perfect sense to an Early Adopter into one that makes perfect sense to a member of the Early Majority.

  Moore’s book is entirely concerned with high technology. But there’s no question that his arguments apply to other kinds of social epidemics as well. In the case of Hush Puppies, the downtown Manhattan kids who rediscovered the brand were wearing the shoes because Hush Puppies were identified with a dated, kitschy, fifties image. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. What they were looking for in fashion was a revolutionary statement. They were willing to take risks in order to set themselves apart. But most of us in the Early and Late Majority don’t want to make a revolutionary statement or take risks with fashion at all. How did Hush Puppies cross the chasm from one group to the next? Lambesis was given a shoe that had a very specific appeal to the southern California skateboarding subculture. Their task was to make it hip and attractive to teenagers all over the world—even teens who had never skateboarded in their life, who didn’t think skateboarding was particularly cool, and who had no functional need for wide outsoles that could easily grip the board and padded uppers to cushion the shocks of doing aerial stunts. That’s clearly not an easy task either. How did they do it? How is it that all the weird, idiosyncratic things that really cool kids do end up in the mainstream?

  This is where, I think, Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen play their most important role. In the chapter on the Law of the Few, I talked about how their special social gifts can cause epidemics to tip. Here, though, it is possible to be much more specific about what they do. They are the ones who make it possible for innovations to overcome this problem of the chasm. They are translators: they take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand. Mark Alpert, the University of Texas professor whom I described as the Ur Maven, is the kind of person who would come over to your house and show you how to install or fix or manipulate a very complicated piece of software. Tom Gau, the quintessential Salesman, takes the very arcane field of tax law and retirement planning and repackages it in terms that make emotional sense to his clients. Lois Weisberg, the Connector, belongs to many different worlds—politics, drama, environmentalism, music, law, medicine, and on and on—and one of the key things she does is to play the intermediary between different social worlds. One of the key figures at Lambesis was DeeDee Gordon, the firm’s former head of market research, and she says that the same process occurs in the case of the fashion trends that periodically sweep through youth culture. The Innovators try something new. Then someone— the teen equivalent of a Maven or a Connector or a Salesman—sees it and adopts it. “Those kids make things more palatable for mainstream people. They see what the really wired kids are doing and they tweak it. They start doing it themselves, but they change it a bit. They make it more usable. Maybe there’s a kid who rolls up his jeans and puts duct tape around the bottom because he’s the one bike messenger in the school. Well, the translators like that look. But they won’t use tape. They’ll buy something with Velcro. Or then there was the whole baby doll T shirt thing. One girl starts wearing a shrunken down T shirt. She goes to Toys R Us and buys the Barbie T shirt. And the others say, that’s so cool. But they might not get it so small, and they might not get it with Barbie on it. They look at it and say, it’s a little off. But there’s a way I can change it and make it okay. Then it takes off.”

  Perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of this process of translation comes from the study of rumors, which are—obviously—the most contagious of all social messages. In his book The Psychology of Rumor, the sociologist Gordon Allport writes of a rumor involving a Chinese teacher who was traveling through Maine on vacation in the summer of 1945, shortly before Japan’s surrender to the Allies at the end of World War II. The teacher was carrying a guidebook, which said that a splendid view of the surrounding countryside could be seen from a certain local hilltop, and he stopped in a small town to ask directions. From that innocent request, a rumor quickly spread: a Japanese spy had gone up the hill to take pictures of the region. “The simple, unadorned facts that constitute the ‘kernel of truth’ in this rumor,” Allport writes, “were from the outset distorted in...three directions.” First of all the story was leveled. All kinds of details that are essential for understanding the true meaning of the incident were left out. There was no mention, Allport points out, of “the courteous and timid approach of the visitor to the native of whom he inquired his way; the fact that the visitor’s precise nationality was unknown,...the fact that the visitor had allowed himself to be readily identified by people along the way.” Then the story was sharpened. The details that remained were made more specific. A man became a spy. Someone who looked Asian became Japanese. Sightseeing became espionage. The guidebook in the teacher’s hand became a camera. Finally, a process of assimilation took place: the story was changed so it made more sense to those spreading the rumor. “A Chinese teacher on a holiday was a concept that could not arise in the minds of most farmers, for they did not know that some American universities employ Chinese scholars on their staffs and that these scholars, like other teachers, are entitled to summer holidays,” Allport writes. “The novel situation was perforce assimilated in terms of the most available frames of reference.” And what were those frames of reference? In 1945, in rural Maine, at a time when virtually every family had a son or relative involved in the war effort, the only way to make sense of a story like that was to fit it into the context of the war. Thus did Asian become Japanese, guidebook become camera, and sightseeing become espionage.

  Psychologists have found that this process of distortion is nearly universal in the spread of rumors. Memory experiments have been done in which subjects are given a story to read or a picture to look at and then asked to return, at intervals of several months, and reproduce what they had been shown. Invariably, significant leveling occurs. All but a few details are dropped. But certain details are also, simultaneously, sharpened. In one classic example, subjects were given a drawing of a hexagon bisected by three lines with seven equal size circles superimposed on top of it. What one typical subject remembered, several months later, was a square bisected by two lines with 38 small circles arrayed around the fringes of the diagram. “There was a marked tendency for any picture or story to gravitate in memory toward what was familiar to the subject in his own life, consonant with his own culture, and above all, to what had some special emotional significance for him,” Allport writes. “In their effort after meaning, the subjects would condense or fill in so as to achieve a better ‘Gestalt,’ a better closure—a simpler, more significant configuration.”

  This is what is meant by translation. What Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning. If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then—whether it is of shoes or behavior or a piece of software—he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.

  2.

  There is a wonderful example of this strategy in action in Baltimore, the city whose problems with drugs and disease I talked about earlier in the book. In Baltimore, as in many communities with a lot of drug addicts, the city sends out a van stocked with thousands of clean syringes to certain street corners in its inner city neighborhoods at certain times in the week. The idea is that for every dirty, used needle that add
icts hand over, they can get a free clean needle in return. In principle, needle exchange sounds like a good way to fight AIDS, since the reuse of old HIV infected needles is responsible for so much of the virus’s spread. But, at least on first examination, it seems to have some obvious limitations. Addicts, for one, aren’t the most organized and reliable of people. So what guarantee is there that they are going to be able to regularly meet up with the needle van? Second, most heroin addicts go through about one needle a day, shooting up at least five or six times—if not more—until the tip of the syringe becomes so blunt that it is useless. That’s a lot of needles. How can a van, coming by once a week, serve the needs of addicts who are shooting up around the clock? What if the van comes by on Tuesday, and by Saturday night an addict has run out?

  To analyze how well the needle program was working, researchers at Johns Hopkins University began, in the mid 1990s, to ride along with the vans in order to talk to the people handing in needles. What they found surprised them. They had assumed that addicts brought in their own dirty needles for exchange, that IV drug users got new needles the way that you or I buy milk: going to the store when it is open and picking up enough for the week. But what they found was that a handful of addicts were coming by each week with knapsacks bulging with 300 or 400 dirty needles at a time, which is obviously far more than they were using themselves. These men were then going back to the street and selling the clean needles for one dollar each. The van, in other words, was a kind of syringe wholesaler. The real retailers were these handfuls of men—these super exchangers—who were prowling around the streets and shooting galleries, picking up dirty needles, and then making a modest living on the clean needles they received in exchange. At first, some of the program’s coordinators had second thoughts. Did they really want taxpayer funded needles financing the habits of addicts? But then they realized that they had stumbled inadvertently into a solution to the limitations of needle exchange programs. “It’s a much, much better system,” says Tom Valente, who teaches in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. “A lot of people shoot on Friday and Saturday night, and they don’t necessarily think in a rational way that they need to have clean tools before they go out. The needle exchange program isn’t going to be available at that time—and certainly not in the shooting galleries. But these [super exchangers] can be there at times when people are doing drugs and when they need clean syringes. They provide twenty four seven service, and it doesn’t cost us anything.”

  One of the researchers who rode with the needle vans was an epidemiologist by the name of Tom Junge. He would flag down the super exchangers and interview them. His conclusion is that they represent a very distinct and special group. “They are all very well connected people,” Junge says. “They know Baltimore inside and out. They know where to go to get any kind of drug and any kind of needle. They have street savvy. I would say that they are unusually socially connected. They have a lot of contacts.... I would have to say the underlying motive is financial or economic. But there is definitely an interest in helping people out.”

  Does this sound familiar? The super exchangers are the Connectors of Baltimore’s drug world. What people at Johns Hopkins would like to do is use the super exchangers to start a counter–drug epidemic. What if they took those same savvy, socially connected, altruistic people and gave them condoms to hand out, or educated them in the kinds of health information that drug addicts desperately need to know? Those super exchangers sound as though they have the skills to bridge the chasm between the medical community and the majority of drug users, who are hopelessly isolated from the information and institutions that could save their lives. They sound as if they have the ability to translate the language and ideas of health promotion into a form that other addicts could understand.

  3.

  Lambesis’s intention was to perform this very same service for Airwalk. Obviously, they couldn’t directly identify the equivalent of Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen to spread the word about Airwalk. They were a tiny ad agency trying to put together an international campaign. What they could do, though, was start an epidemic in which their own ad campaign played the role of translator, serving as an intermediary between the Innovators and everyone else. If they did their homework right, they realized, they could be the ones to level and sharpen and assimilate the cutting edge ideas of youth culture and make them acceptable for the Majority. They could play the role of Connector, Maven, and Salesman.

  The first thing Lambesis did was to develop an in house market research program, aimed at the youth market that Airwalk wanted to conquer. If they were going to translate Innovator ideas for the mainstream, they first had to find out what those Innovator ideas were. To run their research division, Lambesis hired DeeDee Gordon, who had previously worked for the Converse athletic shoe company. Gordon is a striking woman, with a languid wit, who lives in a right angled, shag rugged, white stuccoed modernist masterpiece in the Hollywood Hills, midway between Madonna’s old house and Aldous Huxley’s old house. Her tastes are almost impossibly eclectic: depending on the day of the week, she might be obsessed with an obscure hip hop band, or an old Peter Sellers movie, or a new Japanese electronic gadget, or a certain shade of white that she has suddenly, mysteriously, decided is very cool. While she was at Converse Gordon noticed white teenage girls in Los Angeles dressing up like Mexican gangsters with the look they called “the wife beater”—a tight white tank top with the bra straps showing—and long shorts and tube socks and shower sandals. “I told them, this is going to hit,” Gordon remembers. “There are just too many people wearing it. We have to make a shower sandal.” So they cut the back off a Converse sneaker, put a sandal outsole on it, and Converse sold half a million pairs. Gordon has a sixth sense of what neighborhoods or bars or clubs to go to in London or Tokyo or Berlin to find out what the latest looks and fashion are. She sometimes comes to New York and sits watching the sidewalks of Soho and the East Village for hours, photographing anything unusual. Gordon is a Maven—a Maven for the elusive, indefinable quality known as cool.

  At Lambesis, Gordon developed a network of young, savvy correspondents in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and Dallas and Seattle and around the world in places like Tokyo and London. These were the kind of people who would have been wearing Hush Puppies in the East Village in the early 1990s. They all fit a particular personality type: they were Innovators.

  “These are kids who are outcasts in some way,” Gordon says. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually true. They feel that way. They always felt like they were different. If you ask kids what worries them, the trendsetter kids pick up on things like germ warfare, or terrorism. They pick up on bigger picture things, whereas the mainstream kids think about being overweight, or their grandparents dying, or how well they are doing in school. You see more activists in trendsetters. People with more passion. I’m looking for somebody who is an individual, who has definitely set herself apart from everybody else, who doesn’t look like their peers.”

  Gordon has a kind of relentless curiosity about the world. “I’ve run into trendsetters who look completely Joe Regular Guy,” she went on. “I can see Joe Regular Guy at a club listening to some totally hard core band playing, and I say to myself, omigod, what’s that guy doing here, and that totally intrigues me, and I have to walk up to him and say, hey, you’re really into this band. What’s up? You know what I mean? I look at everything. If I see Joe Regular Guy sitting in a coffee shop and everyone around him has blue hair, I’m going to gravitate toward him because, hey, what’s Joe Regular Guy doing in a coffee shop with people with blue hair?”

  With her stable of Innovator correspondents in place, Gordon would then go back to them two or three or four times a year, asking them what music they were listening to, what television shows they were watching, what clothes they were buying, or what their goals and aspirations were. The data were not always coherent. They required interpretation. Different ideas would pop up in different parts
of the country, then sometimes move east to west or sometimes west to east. But by looking at the big picture, by comparing the data from Austin to Seattle and Seattle to Los Angeles and Los Angeles to New York, and watching it change from one month to the next, Gordon was able to develop a picture of the rise and movement of new trends across the country. And by comparing what her Innovators were saying and doing with what mainstream kids were saying and doing three months or six months or a year later, she was able to track what sorts of ideas were able to make the jump from the cool subcultures to the Majority.

  “Take the whole men wearing makeup, the Kurt Cobain, androgynous thing,” Gordon said. “You know how he used to paint his fingernails with Magic Marker? We saw that in the Northwest first, then trickling through Los Angeles and New York and Austin because they have a hip music scene. Then it trickled into other parts of the country. That took a long time to go mainstream.”

  Gordon’s findings became the template for the Airwalk campaign. If she found new trends or ideas or concepts that were catching fire among Innovators around the country, the firm would plant those same concepts in the Airwalk ads they were creating. Once, for example, Gordon picked up on the fact that trendsetters were developing a sudden interest in Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The influential rap band Beastie Boys were very publicly putting money into the Free Tibet campaign, and were bringing monks on stage at their concerts to give testimonials. “The Beastie Boys pushed that through and made it okay,” Gordon remembers. So Lambesis made a very funny Airwalk ad with a young Airwalk wearing monk sitting at a desk in a classroom writing a test. He’s looking down at his feet because he’s written cheat notes on the side of his shoes. (When a billboard version of the ad was put up in San Francisco, Lambesis was forced to take it down, after Tibetan monks protested that monks don’t touch their feet, let alone cheat on tests.) When James Bond started popping up on the trendsetter radar, Lambesis hired the director of the James Bond movies to film a series of commercials, all of which featured Airwalk clad characters making wild escapes from faceless villains. When trendsetters started to show an ironic interest in country club culture, and began wearing old Fred Perry and Izod golf shirts, Airwalk made a shoe out of tennis ball material and Lambesis made a print ad of the shoe being thrown up in the air and hit with a tennis racket. “One time we noticed that the future technology thing was really big,” Gordon says. “You’d ask some kid what they would invent, if they could invent anything they wanted, and it was always about effortless living. You know, put your head in a bubble, push a button, and it comes out perfect. So we got Airwalk to do these rounded, bubbly outsoles for the shoes. We started mixing materials—meshes and breathable materials and special types of Gore Tex and laying them on top of each other.” To look through the inventory of Airwalk ads in that critical period, in fact, is to get a complete guide to the fads and infatuations and interests of the youth culture of the era: there are 30 second spoofs of kung fu movies, a TV spot on Beat poetry, an X-files–style commercial in which a young man driving into Roswell, New Mexico, has his Airwalks confiscated by aliens.