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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

the people who die in highly publicized suicides—whose deaths give others “permission” to die—serve as the Tipping Points in suicide epidemics.

Smoking, overwhelmingly, was associated with the same thing to nearly everyone: sophistication.

serious smokers can be separated from nonsmokers along very simple personality lines. The quintessential hard-core smoker, according to Eysenck, is an extrovert, the kind of person who is sociable, likes parties, has many friends, needs to have people to talk to.... He craves excitement, takes chances, acts on the spur of the moment and is generally an impulsive individual.... He prefers to keep moving and doing things, tends to be aggressive and loses his temper quickly; his feelings are not kept under tight control and he is not always a reliable person.

The average smoking household spends 73 percent more on coffee and two to three times as much on beer as the average nonsmoking household.

“I would invite readers to demonstrate [the smoking personality connection] to themselves by performing the following experiment. Arrange to go to a relaxed gathering of actors, rock musicians, or hairdressers on the one hand, or civil engineers, electricians, or computer programmers on the other, and observe how much smoking is going on. If your experience is anything like mine, the differences should be dramatic.”

Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking isn’t cool. But that’s not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool.

Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.

There are millions of Americans, in other words, who manage to smoke regularly and not be hooked—people for whom smoking is contagious but not sticky. In the past few years, these “chippers”—as they have been dubbed—have been exhaustively studied,

a chipper is someone who smokes no more than five cigarettes a day but who smokes at least four days a week.

their smoking patterns often include days of complete abstinence. Chippers reported little difficulty maintaining such casual abstinence and reportedly experienced almost no withdrawal symptoms when abstaining from smoking.... Unlike regular smokers who smoke soon on waking to replenish the nicotine that has cleared overnight, chippers go several hours before smoking their first cigarette of the day. In short, every indicator examined suggests that chippers are not addicted to nicotine and that their smoking is not driven by withdrawal relief or withdrawal avoidance. Shiffman calls chippers the equivalent of social drinkers. They are people in control of their habit.

If we are looking for Tipping Points in the war on smoking, then, we need to decide which of those sides of the epidemic we will have the most success attacking. Should we try to make smoking less contagious, to stop the Salesmen who spread the smoking virus? Or are we better off trying to make it less sticky, to look for ways to turn all smokers into chippers?

Parents are powerfully invested in the idea that they can shape their children’s personalities and behavior.

try and measure this very question—the effect parents have on their children. Obviously, they pass on genes to their offspring, and genes play a big role in who we are. Parents provide love and affection in the early years of childhood; deprived of early emotional sustenance, children will be irreparably harmed. Parents provide food and a home and protection and the basics of everyday life that children need to be safe and healthy and happy. This much is easy. But does it make a lasting difference to the personality of your child if you are an anxious and inexperienced parent, as opposed to being authoritative and competent? Are you more likely to create intellectually curious children by filling your house with books? Does it affect your child’s personality if you see him or her two hours a day, as opposed to eight hours a day? In other words, does the specific social environment that we create in our homes make a real difference in the way our children end up as adults?

if nurture matters so much, then why did the adopted kids not resemble their adoptive parents at all? The Colorado study isn’t saying that genes explain everything and that environment doesn’t matter. On the contrary, all of the results strongly suggest that our environment plays as big—if not bigger—a role as heredity in shaping personality and intelligence. What it is saying is that whatever that environmental influence is, it doesn’t have a lot to do with parents.

the environmental influence that helps children become who they are—that shapes their character and personality—is their peer group.

Teenage smoking is about being a teenager, about sharing in the emotional experience and expressive language and rituals of adolescence, which are as impenetrable and irrational to outsiders as the rituals of adolescent suicide in Micronesia.

“Telling teenagers about the health risks of smoking—It will make you wrinkled! It will make you impotent! It will make you dead!—is useless,” Harris concludes. “This is adult propaganda; these are adult arguments. It is because adults don’t approve of smoking—because there is something dangerous and disreputable about it—that teenagers want to do it.”

As psychiatric problems increase, the correlation with smoking grows stronger. About 80 percent of alcoholics smoke. Close to 90 percent of schizophrenics smoke.

depression is believed to be the result, at least in part, of a problem in the production of certain key brain chemicals, in particular the neurotransmitters known as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. These are the chemicals that regulate mood, that contribute to feelings of confidence and mastery and pleasure. Drugs like Zoloft and Prozac work because they prompt the brain to produce more serotonin: they compensate, in other words, for the deficit of serotonin that some depressed people suffer from. Nicotine appears to do exactly the same thing with the other two key neurotransmitters—dopamine and norepinephrine. Those smokers who are depressed, in short, are essentially using tobacco as a cheap way of treating their own depression, of boosting the level of brain chemicals they need to function normally. This effect is strong enough that when smokers with a history of psychiatric problems give up cigarettes, they run a sizable risk of relapsing into depression.

if you can treat smokers for depression, you may be able to make their habit an awful lot easier to break.

Bupropion does two things. It increases your dopamine, so smokers don’t have the desire to smoke, then it replaces some of the norepinephrine, so they don’t have the agitation, the withdrawal symptoms.” Glaxo Wellcome has tested the drug—now marketed under the name Zyban—in heavily addicted smokers (more than 15 cigarettes a day) and found remarkable effects. In the study, 23 percent of smokers given a course of anti-smoking counseling and a placebo quit after four weeks. Of those given counseling and the nicotine patch, 36 percent had quit after four weeks. The same figure for Zyban, though, was 49 percent, and of those heavily addicted smokers given both Zyban and the patch, 58 percent had quit after a month. Interestingly, Zoloft and Prozac—the serotonin drugs—don’t seem to help smokers to quit. It’s not enough to lift mood, in other words; you have to lift mood in precisely the same way that nicotine does, and only Zyban does that.

it is possible to find a sticky Tipping Point with smoking: that by zeroing in on depression, you can exploit a critical vulnerability in the addiction process.

Nicotine addiction, then, is far from an instant development. It takes time for most people to get hooked on cigarettes, and just because teens are smoking at fifteen doesn’t mean that they will inevitably become addicted. You’ve got about three years to stop them.

there is an addiction Tipping Point, a threshold—that if you smoke below a certain number of cigarettes you aren’t addicted at all, but once you go above that magic number you suddenly are. This is another, more complete way of making sense of chippers: they are people who simply never smoke enough to hit that addiction threshold.

Chippers, they point out, are people who are capable of smoking up to five cigarettes a day without getting addicted. That suggests that the amount of nicotine found in five cigarettes—which works out to somewhere between four and six milligrams of nicotine—is probably somewhere close to the addiction threshold.

experimentation and actual hard-core use are two entirely separate things—that for a drug to be contagious does not automatically mean that it is also sticky.

This is how they learn about the world, and most of the time—in 99.1 percent of the cases with cocaine—that experimentation doesn’t result in anything bad happening. We have to stop fighting this kind of experimentation. We have to accept it and even to embrace it. Teens are always going to be fascinated by people like Maggie the au pair and Billy G. and Pam P., and they should be fascinated by people like that, if only to get past the adolescent fantasy that to be rebellious and truculent and irresponsible is a good way to spend your life. What we should be doing instead of fighting experimentation is making sure that experimentation doesn’t have serious consequences.

This is the first lesson of the Tipping Point. Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word-of-mouth epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on those three groups. No one else matters.

indiscriminate application of effort is something that is not always possible. There are times when we need a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot out of a little, and that is what Tipping Points, in the end, are all about.

The world—much as we want it to—does not accord with our intuition. This is the second lesson of the Tipping Point. Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.

To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.

Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action.

Millions of kids who grow up just as emotionally impoverished as Andy Williams don’t walk into their school one morning and start shooting. The difference is Columbine. Andy Williams was infected by the example of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, just as the suicides of Micronesia were infected by the example of that first dramatic love triangle. It is a mistake to try to make sense of these kinds of actions by blaming influences of the outside world — in terms of broader trends of violence and social breakdown. These are epidemics in isolation: they follow a mysterious, internal script that makes sense only in the closed world that teenagers inhabit.

almost all cases fit a pattern. Someone sees a neighbor fall ill and becomes convinced that he is being contaminated by some unseen evil — in the past it was demons and spirits; nowadays it tends to be toxins and gases — and his fear makes him anxious. His anxiety makes him dizzy and nauseated. He begins to hyperventilate. He collapses. Other people hear the same allegation, see the “victim” faint, and they begin to get anxious themselves. They feel nauseated. They hyperventilate. They collapse, and before you know it everyone in the room is hyperventilating and collapsing. These symptoms, Wessely stresses, are perfectly genuine. It’s just that they are manifestations of a threat that is wholly imagined.

The post-Columbine outbreak of school shootings is, in this sense, no different. It is happening because Columbine happened, and because ritualized, dramatic, self-destructive behavior among teenagers — whether it involves suicide, smoking, taking a gun to school, or fainting after drinking a harmless can of Coke — has extraordinary contagious power.

Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last.

it’s hard to believe that people are really watching commercials as closely as they did before. The same is true for a magazine with hundreds of advertisements or a roadside with billboards every hundred feet. When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, admire, and trust. The cure for immunity is finding Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen.