There are two explanations for why this strategy was so successful. The first is obvious. Lambesis was picking on various, very contagious, trends while they were still in their infancy. By the time their new ad campaign and the shoes to go along with it were ready, that trend (with luck) would just be hitting the mainstream. Lambesis, in other words, was piggy backing on social epidemics, associating Airwalk with each new trend wave that swept through youth culture. “It’s all about timing,” Gordon says. “You follow the trendsetters. You see what they are doing. It takes a year to produce those shoes. By the time the year goes, if your trend is the right trend, it’s going to hit those mainstream people at the right time. So if you see future technology as a trend—if you see enough trendsetters in enough cities buying things that are ergonomic in design, or shoes that are jacked up, or little Palm Pilots, and when you ask them to invent something, they’re all talking about flying cars of the future—that’s going to lead you to believe that within six months to a year everyone and his grandmother will be into the same thing.”
Lambesis wasn’t just a passive observer in this process, however. It is also the case that their ads helped to tip the ideas they were discovering among Innovators. Gordon says, for example, that when something fails to make it out of the trendsetter community into the mainstream, it’s usually because the idea doesn’t root itself broadly enough in the culture: “There aren’t enough cues. You didn’t see it in music and film and art and fashion. Usually, if something’s going to make it, you’ll see that thread running throughout everything—through what they like on TV, what they want to invent, what they want to listen to, even the materials they want to wear. It’s everywhere. But if something doesn’t make it, you’ll only see it in one of those areas.” Lambesis was taking certain ideas, and planting them everywhere. And as they planted them, they provided that critical translation. Gordon’s research showed that Innovator kids were heavily into the Dalai Lama and all of the very serious issues raised by the occupation of Tibet. So Lambesis took one very simple reference to that—a Tibetan monk—and put him in a funny, slightly cheeky situation. They tweaked it. The Innovators had a heavily ironic interest in country club culture. Lambesis lightened that. They made the shoe into a tennis ball, and that made the reference less arch and more funny. Innovators were into kung fu movies. So Lambesis made a kung fu parody ad in which the Airwalk hero fights off martial arts villains with his skateboard. Lambesis took the kung fu motif and merged it with youth culture. In the case of the Chinese scholar’s vacation, according to Allport, the facts of the situation didn’t make sense to the people of the town;so they came up with an interpretation that did make sense—that the scholar was a spy—and, to make that new interpretation work, “discordant details were leveled out, incidents were sharpened to fit the chosen theme, and the episode as a whole was assimilated to the preexisting structure of feeling and thought characteristic of the members of the group among whom the rumor spread.” That’s just what Lambesis did. They took the cultural cues from the Innovators—cues that the mainstream kids may have seen but not been able to make sense of—and leveled, sharpened, and assimilated them into a more coherent form. They gave those cues a specific meaning that they did not have previously and packaged that new sensibility in the form of a pair of shoes. It can hardly be a surprise that the Airwalk rumor spread so quickly in 1995 and 1996.
4.
The Airwalk epidemic did not last. In 1997, the company’s sales began to falter. The firm had production problems and difficulty filling their orders. In critical locations, Airwalk failed to supply enough product for the back to school season, and its once loyal distributors began to turn against it. At the same time, the company began to lose that cutting edge sensibility that it had traded on for so long. “When Airwalk started, the product was directional and inventive. The shoes were very forward,” said Chad Farmer. “We maintained the trendsetter focus on the marketing. But the product began to slip. The company began to listen more and more to the sales staff and the product started to get that homogenized, mainstream look. Everybody loved the marketing. In focus groups that we do, they still talk about how they miss it. But the number one complaint is, what happened to the cool product?” Lambesis’s strategy was based on translating Innovator shoes for the Majority. But suddenly Airwalk wasn’t an Innovator shoe anymore. “We made another, critical mistake,” Lee Smith, the former president of Airwalk says. “We had a segmentation strategy, where the small, independent core skate shops—the three hundred boutiques around the country who really created us—had a certain product line that was exclusive to them. They didn’t want us to be in the mall. So what we did was, we segmented our product. We said to the core shops, you don’t have to compete with the malls. It worked out very well.” The boutiques were given the technical shoes: different designs, better materials, more padding, different cushioning systems, different rubber compounds, more expensive uppers. “We had a special signature model—the Tony Hawk—for skateboarding, which was a lot beefier and more durable. It would retail for about eighty dollars.” The shoes Airwalk distributed to Kinney’s or Champ’s or Foot Locker, meanwhile, were less elaborate and would retail for about $60. The Innovators always got to wear a different, more exclusive shoe than everyone else. The mainstream customer had the satisfaction of wearing the same brand as the cool kids.
But then, at the height of its success, Airwalk switched strategies. The company stopped giving the specialty shops their own shoes. “That’s when the trendsetters started to get a disregard for the brand,” says Farmer. “They started to go to their boutiques where they got their cool stuff, and they realized that everyone else could get the very same shoes at J C Penney.” Now, all of a sudden, Lambesis was translating the language of mainstream products for the mainstream. The epidemic was over.
“My category manager once asked me what happened,” Smith says, “and I told him, you ever see Forrest Gump? Stupid is as stupid does. Well, cool is as cool does. Cool brands treat people well, and we didn’t. I had personally promised some of those little shops that we would give them special product, then we changed our minds. That was the beginning. In that world, it all works on word of mouth. When we became bigger, that’s when we should have paid more attention to the details and kept a good buzz going, so when people said you guys are sellouts, you guys went mainstream, you suck, we could have said, you know what, we don’t. We had this little jewel of a brand, and little by little we sold that off into the mainstream, and once we had sold it all”—he paused—“so what? You buy a pair of our shoes. Why would you ever buy another?”
SEVEN
Case Study
SUICIDE, SMOKING,
AND THE SEARCH FOR
THE UNSTICKY CIGARETTE
Not long ago, on the South Pacific islands of Micronesia, a seventeen year old boy named Sima got into an argument with his father. He was staying with his family at his grandfather’s house when his father—a stern and demanding man—ordered him out of bed early one morning and told him to find a bamboo pole knife to harvest breadfruit. Sima spent hours in the village, looking without success for a pole knife, and when he returned empty handed, his father was furious. The family would now go hungry, he told his son, waving a machete in rage. “Get out of here and go find somewhere else to live.”
Sima left his grandfather’s house and walked back to his home village. Along the way he ran into his fourteen year old brother and borrowed a pen. Two hours later, curious about where Sima had gone, his brother went looking for him. He returned to the now empty family house and peered in the window. In the middle of a dark room, hanging slack and still from a noose, was Sima. He was dead. His suicide note read:
My life is coming to an end at this time. Now today is a day of sorrow for myself, also a day of suffering for me. But it is a day of celebration for Papa. Today Papa sent me away. Thank you for loving me so little. Sima.
Give my farewell to Mama. Mama you won’t have
any more frustration or trouble from your boy. Much love from Sima.
In the early 1960s, suicide on the islands of Micronesia was almost unknown. But for reasons no one quite understands, it then began to rise, steeply and dramatically, by leaps and bounds every year, until by the end of the 1980s there were more suicides per capita in Micronesia than anywhere else in the world. For males between fifteen and twenty four, the suicide rate in the United States is about 22 per 100,000. In the islands of Micronesia the rate is about 160 per 100,000—more than seven times higher. At that level, suicide is almost commonplace, triggered by the smallest of incidents. Sima took his own life because his father yelled at him. In the midst of the Micronesian epidemic, that was hardly unusual. Teens committed suicide on the islands because they saw their girlfriends with another boy, or because their parents refused to give them a few extra dollars for beer. One nineteen year old hanged himself because his parents didn’t buy him a graduation gown. One seventeen year old hanged himself because he had been rebuked by his older brother for making too much noise. What, in Western cultures, is something rare, random, and deeply pathological, has become in Micronesia a ritual of adolescence, with its own particular rules and symbols. Virtually all suicides on the islands, in fact, are identical variations on Sima’s story. The victim is almost always male. He is in his late teens, unmarried, and living at home. The precipitating event is invariably domestic: a dispute with girlfriends or parents. In three quarters of the cases, the victim had never tried—or even threatened—suicide before. The suicide notes tend to express not depression but a kind of wounded pride and self pity, a protest against mistreatment. The act itself typically occurs on a weekend night, usually after a bout of drinking with friends. In all but a few cases, the victim observes the same procedure, as if there were a strict, unwritten protocol about the correct way to take one’s own life. He finds a remote spot or empty house. He takes a rope and makes a noose, but he does not suspend himself, as in a typical Western hanging. He ties the noose to a low branch or a window or a doorknob and leans forward, so that the weight of his body draws the noose tightly around his neck, cutting off the flow of blood to the brain. Unconsciousness follows. Death results from anoxia—the shortage of blood to the brain.
In Micronesia, the anthropologist Donald Rubinstein writes, these rituals have become embedded in the local culture. As the number of suicides have grown, the idea has fed upon itself, infecting younger and younger boys, and transforming the act itself so that the unthinkable has somehow been rendered thinkable. According to Rubinstein, who has documented the Micronesian epidemic in a series of brilliant papers,
Suicide ideation among adolescents appears widespread in certain Micronesian communities and is popularly expressed in recent songs composed locally and aired on Micronesian radio stations, and in graffiti adorning T shirts and high school walls. A number of young boys who attempted suicide reported that they first saw or heard about it when they were 8 or 10 years old. Their suicide attempts appear in the spirit of imitative or experimental play. One 11 year old boy, for example, hanged himself inside his house and when found he was already unconscious and his tongue protruding. He later explained that he wanted to “try” out hanging. He said that he did not want to die, although he knew he was risking death. Such cases of imitative suicide attempts by boys as young as five and six have been reported recently from Truk. Several cases of young adolescent suicide deaths recently in Micronesia were evidently the outcome of such experiments. Thus as suicide grows more frequent in these communities the idea itself acquires a certain familiarity if not fascination to young men, and the lethality of the act seems to be trivialized. Especially among some younger boys, the suicide acts appear to have acquired an experimental almost recreational element.
There is something very chilling about this passage. Suicide isn’t supposed to be trivialized like this. But the truly chilling thing about it is how familiar it all seems. Here we have a contagious epidemic of self destruction, engaged in by youth in the spirit of experimentation, imitation, and rebellion. Here we have a mindless action that somehow, among teenagers, has become an important form of self expression. In a strange way, the Micronesian teen suicide epidemic sounds an awful lot like the epidemic of teenage smoking in the West.
1.
Teenage smoking is one of the great, baffling phenomena of modern life. No one really knows how to fight it, or even, for that matter, what it is. The principal assumption of the anti smoking movement has been that tobacco companies persuade teens to smoke by lying to them, by making smoking sound a lot more desirable and a lot less harmful than it really is. To address that problem, then, we’ve restricted and policed cigarette advertising, so it’s a lot harder for tobacco companies to lie. We’ve raised the price of cigarettes and enforced the law against selling tobacco to minors, to try to make it much harder for teens to buy cigarettes. And we’ve run extensive public health campaigns on television and radio and in magazines to try to educate teens about the dangers of smoking.
It has become fairly obvious, however, that this approach isn’t very effective. Why do we think, for example, that the key to fighting smoking is educating people about the risks of cigarettes? Harvard University economist W. Kip Viscusi recently asked a group of smokers to guess how many years of life, on average, smoking from the age of twenty one onward would cost them. They guessed nine years. The real answer is somewhere around six or seven. Smokers aren’t smokers because they underestimate the risks of smoking. They smoke even though they overestimate the risk of smoking. At the same time, it is not clear how effective it is to have adults tell teenagers that they shouldn’t smoke. As any parent of a teenage child will tell you, the essential contrariness of adolescents suggests that the more adults inveigh against smoking and lecture teenagers about its dangers, the more teens, paradoxically, will want to try it. Sure enough, if you look at smoking trends over the past decade or so, that is exactly what has happened. The anti smoking movement has never been louder or more prominent. Yet all signs suggest that among the young the anti smoking message is backfiring. Between 1993 and 1997, the number of college students who smoke jumped from 22.3 percent to 28.5 percent. Between 1991 and 1997, the number of high school students who smoke jumped 32 percent. Since 1988, in fact, the total number of teen smokers in the United States has risen an extraordinary 73 percent. There are few public health programs in recent years that have fallen as short of their mission as the war on smoking.
The lesson here is not that we should give up trying to fight cigarettes. The point is simply that the way we have tended to think about the causes of smoking doesn’t make a lot of sense. That’s why the epidemic of suicide in Micronesia is so interesting and potentially relevant to the smoking problem. It gives us another way of trying to come to terms with youth smoking. What if smoking, instead of following the rational principles of the marketplace, follows the same kind of mysterious and complex social rules and rituals that govern teen suicide? If smoking really is an epidemic like Micronesian suicide, how does that change the way we ought to fight the problem?
2.
The central observation of those who study suicide is that, in some places and under some circumstances, the act of one person taking his or her own life can be contagious. Suicides lead to suicides. The pioneer in this field is David Phillips, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego, who has conducted a number of studies on suicide, each more fascinating and seemingly improbable than the last. He began by making a list of all the stories about suicide that ran on the front page of the country’s most prominent newspapers in the twenty year stretch between the end of the 1940s and the end of the 1960s. Then he matched them up with suicide statistics from the same period. He wanted to know whether there was any relationship between the two. Sure enough, there was. Immediately after stories about suicides appeared, suicides in the area served by the newspaper jumped. In the case of national stories, the rate jumped nationally. (
Marilyn Monroe’s death was followed by a temporary 12 percent increase in the national suicide rate.) Then Phillips repeated his experiment with traffic accidents. He took front page suicide stories from the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and matched them up with traffic fatalities from the state of California. He found the same pattern. On the day after a highly publicized suicide, the number of fatalities from traffic accidents was, on average, 5.9 percent higher than expected. Two days after a suicide story, traffic deaths rose 4.1 percent. Three days after, they rose 3.1 percent, and four days after, they rose 8.1 percent. (After ten days, the traffic fatality rate was back to normal.) Phillips concluded that one of the ways in which people commit suicide is by deliberately crashing their cars, and that these people were just as susceptible to the contagious effects of a highly publicized suicide as were people killing themselves by more conventional means.
The Tipping Point Page 19
