THE TIPPING POINT
How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
WHAT IS THE TIPPING POINT?

It is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or
social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and
spreads like wildfire.
Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or
products start epidemics and others don’t?
 What can we do to deliberately start and control
positive epidemics of our own?

EPIDEMICS IN ACTION
Rise of Hush Puppies shoes & fall of crime rate
 3 characteristics:

Little changes had big effects
 Contagious behavior
 Both changes happened in a hurry

THE THREE RULES OF EPIDEMICS
The Law of the Few
 The Stickiness Factor
 The Power of Context

THE LAW OF THE FEW
The success of any kind of social epidemic is
heavily dependent on the involvement of people
with a particular and rare set of social gifts
 The 80/20 principle
 Paul Revere’s midnight ride
 Stanley Milgram’s small world problem


How are human beings connected?
WHO ARE “THE FEW”
Connectors: the kind of people who know
everyone and possess special gifts for bringing
the world together
 Mavens: means one who accumulates knowledge
and who has information on a lot of different
products or prices or places
 Salesmen: the select group of people with the
skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of
what we are hearing

LET’S TALK ABOUT IT

Which are you?
Connector
 Maven
 Salesmen


Who are you most likely to be influenced by?

Are there an equal number of each in the world?
IN A SOCIAL EPIDEMIC
 Mavens
are data banks, they provide the
message
 Connectors are the social glue, they spread
the message
 Salesmen have the skills to persuade us
when we are unconvinced of what we are
hearing, and they are the equally as critical
to the tipping of the word-of-mouth
epidemics as the other two groups
THE STICKINESS FACTOR
Stickiness means that a message makes an
impact; it “sticks” in the minds of the public and
influences their future behavior
 What makes a message memorable?

SESAME STREET
Goal: create a learning epidemic to counter the
prevailing epidemics of poverty and illiteracy
 In this case the agent of infection (TV) was used
to infect a positive virus (literacy)
 Result: by making small but critical adjustments
in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they
could overcome TV’s weakness as a teaching tool
and make what they had to say memorable

BLUE’S CLUES
Used many of Sesame Street’s techniques
 Key changes:

Teach children to think in the same way that they
teach themselves to think
 Intellectually and behaviorally active
 Repetition and layering

THE POWER OF CONTEXT
The key to getting people to change their
behavior sometimes lies in the smallest detail of
their immediate situation
 Humans are a lot more sensitive to their
environment than they may seem
 Epidemics are strongly influenced by their
situation, by the circumstances and conditions
and particulars of the environments in which
they operate

CONCLUSION:
The law of the few says that there are exceptional
people out there who are capable of starting
epidemics. All you have to do is find them.
 The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a
simple way to package information that, under
the right circumstances, can make it irresistible.
All you have to do is find it.
