Stephen Clancy
Marketing Management
Professor Burzycki
9 December, 2014
Book Report 1: The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big
Difference, was a very easy and fascinating read for me. Gladwell analyzes how an idea, product,
trend, sickness, or social behavior turns from ordinary to extraordinary. To me, a factor that often
that goes unnoticed; how two products of a similar nature that are equally accessible to the
public, yet one folds and the other turns into a popular social trend and best seller. The first story
Gladwell tells is about the Hush Puppy shoes reemergence emergence in Manhattan during the
mid-1990s. Executives, Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis, were down to selling 30,000 pairs of
the brushed-suede shoes in 1994 to 430,000 pairs the next year in 1995, and nearly 2 million
sales in 1996 while winning the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers.
How is it that a small group of hipster kids sporting Hush Puppies in the bar and club scene in
East Village and Soho, could turn a shoe into a national fashion trend?
Gladwell states that social behaviors similarly spread the same way epidemics and
viruses do. Each depend vastly on “the peoples whose lives and behaviors are well outside of the
ordinary.(pg.20) Economists call it the 80/20 rule; where 80% of the work is done by 20% of the
people. In most societies, 20% percent of criminals commit 80% of the crime. Gladwell
correlates this to the gonorrhea epidemic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. A town in excess of
100,000 people, in 6 months half of all the cases that came in could be traced back to four
neighborhoods, representing only 6% of the geographic area of the city. 768 people and 168 of
them were responsible for this epidemic in 4 small neighborhoods. He says how these people
were clearly outside of the norm of everyone else, how they were people who went out every
night and have vastly more sexual partners. Even though the situations of the hipster kids
sporting Hush Puppies and the gonorrhea-spreading bar hoppers are completely different,
Gladwell states that essentially, they are the same. He calls these people, “Connectors,” the type
of people who know everyone and have an extraordinary knack of making friends and
acquaintances. Connecters, as we saw, can use this trait in positive and negative ways, and are
clearly more important for more than the number of people they know.
In 1974, Mark Granovetter, in his study, Getting a Job, looked at several hundred
professional and technical workers from a Boston suburb to see how all of them became
employed. 56% found their job through a personal connection and the majority claimed that this
was a “weak tie” only seeing this acquaintance occasionally or rarely. Gladwell goes on to
explain how there are “masters of the weak tie.” These individual connectors have an extreme
gift and power for opportunity. This power goes beyond a job connection or wealth opportunity,
but also to turn restaurants, movies, and fashion trends into enormous popularity through word of
mouth. In the first five chapters, there are a number of examples how one individual with loose
ties to a number of different worlds and subcultures were responsible for the outcome of
something extraordinary. However, connectors cannot receive all the credit when it comes to a
popular social behavior. In the historical example of Paul Revere and the American Revolution
in chapter 5 and 6, Gladwell shows us how Revere was not only a Connector, but also a
“Maven.”
A Maven is a Yiddish term and it means one who accumulates knowledge. “A Maven is a
person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places.”(pg.62) Paul
Revere was a man who was intensely social and popular, but he was also well informed. Even
before his midnight ride, Revere knew everyone, he was the link between every group and
committee. Gladwell states that it was no accident that he was the one the stable boy who
overheard the British troops talking about there being “hell to pay” the following afternoon.
What makes him a Maven is not just his obsessive to collect information, but also to share it.
Even in today’s market, a Maven know the inside scoop and deals in the marketplace; they are
more than experts because they know best decisions and want to help you with yours. A Maven
is not a persuader because they are not forcing their opinion on you, their motivation is to
educate and help. They are teachers and students. Gladwell calls Mavens in a social epidemic the
“data banks” that provide the message, and Connectors the “social glue” that spread it.(pg.70)
The third and final category of people Gladwell talks about are “Salesman,” or people
with the powerful ability of persuasion. Gladwell goes into the science of persuasion, like what
makes a salesman a good salesman? He gives personal experiences with people who have this
special personality and mastery of speech to take over a conversation. There is research that
shows the interaction between talking and listening: the timing, rhythm, volume, pitch, emphasis,
articulation, and non-verbal cues that can make some people powerfully persuasive. He mentions
the terms “interactional synchrony” and “latency,” which linguists call the period of time that
lapses between the moment one speaker stops talking and the other speaker begins, can cause
two people to arrive at a conversation at different times. Gladwell gives examples of the
California business man, Tom Gau and news anchor Peter Jennings. Men like this when they
talk, seem to keep the conversation on their terms by a form of persuasion that’s almost sensual.
Just like Connectors and Mavens, this is a “super-reflex,” a fundamental physiological ability
that some people have much more mastery than others.(pg.83)
The final two points Gladwell discusses are “The Stickiness Factor” and “The Power of
Context.” He looks at examples in television, the addictive ability television programs, movies,
and even commercials have at grabbing and keeping attention is the Stickiness Factor. More
specifically, children were analyzed when watching Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues. This study
showed that kids don’t look at the TV when they are stimulated and look away when they are
bored, they watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. These two
shows triggered kids’ love for animals and thirst to learn the new and interesting information
being shown.(pg.118) “The Power of Context,” Gladwell states is critically important when
looking at any social epidemic because they directly correlate to the conditions and
circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.(pg.140)
To conclude my report on Malcolm Gladwell’s, The Tipping Point, I believe the points he
discusses are extremely beneficial to me and everyone, for that matter. Like I previously stated,
the reason behind why things happen often go under looked. I really enjoyed learning the
characteristics in the types of people that make social changes in trends throughout history. I
consider myself to be a person of influence and I know that the things I learned in the benefits to
being socially connected to as many people in many diverse ‘worlds’ has countless possibilities
and opportunities. More importantly, being connected to the right people and the right
information has the most power. Even in this day and age of mass communication and electronic
connection, the power of “word of mouth” still seems to hold the most weight. This information
is applicable beyond the business world and can be beneficial in all forms of relationship
building.
Very good paper
GRADE 92