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

by Malcolm Gladwell

In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people—Salesmen—with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.

Gau’s pitch is that his firm offers clients a level of service and expertise they’ll have difficulty getting anywhere else.

Moine’s argument is that what separates a great salesman from an average one is the number and quality of answers they have to the objections commonly raised by potential clients.

For example: “I can do it myself” is one, and for that the script book lists fifty potential answers. “Aren’t you concerned about making the wrong moves and having no one there to help you?” for instance.

According to the standard ways by which we measure persuasiveness—by the logic and appropriateness of the persuader’s arguments—that

What was interesting about Gau is the extent to which he seemed to be persuasive in a way quite different from the content of his words.

It’s energy. It’s enthusiasm. It’s charm. It’s likability. It’s all those things and yet something more.

“Very. I’m probably the most optimistic person you could ever imagine. You take the most optimistic person you know and take it to the hundredth power, that’s me.

There are so many people who are negative. Someone will say, you can’t do that. And I’ll say, what do you mean I can’t do that?

“Gosh darn it,” Gau said, “if you don’t try, you’ll never succeed.”

But Peter Jennings of ABC was much different. For Mondale, he scored 13.38. But when he talked about Reagan, his face lit up so much he scored 17.44.

The only possible conclusion, according to the study, is that Jennings exhibited a “significant and noticeable bias in facial expression” toward Reagan.

In every case, those who watched ABC voted for Reagan in far greater numbers than those who watched CBS or NBC.

They wanted tuition to rise, on average, to $646. The simple act of moving their heads up and down, ostensibly for another reason entirely—was sufficient to cause them to recommend a policy that would take money out of their own pockets.

There are in these two studies, I think, very important clues as to what makes someone like Tom Gau—or, for that matter, any of the Salesmen in our lives—so effective. The first is that little things can, apparently, make as much of a difference as big things.

But in the particular, unguarded way that people watch the news, a little bias can suddenly go a long way. “When people watch the news, they don’t intentionally filter biases out, or feel they have to argue against the expression of the newscaster,”

This isn’t an obvious verbal message that we automatically dig in our heels against. It’s much more subtle and for that reason much more insidious, and that much harder to insulate ourselves against.”

The second implication of these studies is that nonverbal cues are as or more important than verbal cues.

Simple physical movements and observations can have a profound effect on how we feel and think.

It’s not that smiles and nods are subliminal messages. They are straightforward and on the surface. It’s just that they are incredibly subtle.

But if you had taken that videotape and slowed it down, until you were looking at our interaction in slices of a fraction of a second, you would have seen something quite different. You would have seen the two of us engaging in what can only be described as an elaborate and precise dance.

The pioneer of this kind of analysis—of what is called the study of cultural microrhythms—is a man named William Condon.

It’s like sculpturing....Continued study reveals further order. When I was looking at this film over and over again,

“interactional synchrony.” Their conversation had a rhythmic physical dimension.

And what’s more, those movements were perfectly in time to each person’s own words—emphasizing and underlining and elaborating on the process of articulation—so that the speaker was, in effect, dancing to his or her own speech.

Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.

Synchrony has even been found in the interactions of humans and apes. It’s part of the way we are hardwired.

When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry.

If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they’ll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant, in the technical sense, by empathy.

It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you. Emotion is contagious. In a way, this is perfectly intuitive.

Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy.

If we think about emotion this way—as outside-in, not inside-out—it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others.

Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people “senders.”

“There are carriers, people who are very expressive, and there are people who are especially susceptible. It’s not that emotional contagion is a disease. But the mechanism is the same.”

Friedman found that in just two minutes, without a word being spoken, the low-scorers ended up picking up the moods of the high-scorers.

But it didn’t work the other way. Only the charismatic person could infect the other people in the room with his or her emotions.

It began on a cold spring morning, with a word-of-mouth epidemic that spread from a little stable boy to all of New England, relying along the way on a small number of very special people: a few Salesmen and a man with the particular genius of both a Maven and a Connector.

The Stickiness Factor

SESAME STREET, BLUE’S CLUES, AND THE EDUCATIONAL VIRUS

the hope was that if that hour was contagious enough it could serve as an educational Tipping Point: giving children from disadvantaged homes a leg up once they began elementary school, spreading prolearning values from watchers to nonwatchers,

But what she wanted to do, in essence, was create a learning epidemic to counter the prevailing epidemics of poverty and illiteracy. She called her idea Sesame Street.

In experiments, children who are asked to read a passage and are then tested on it will invariably score higher than children asked to watch a video of the same subject matter.

Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.

The Law of the Few, which I talked about in the previous chapter, says that one critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger.

Roger Horchow, likewise, faxed all his friends about the restaurant his daughter took him to, performing the first step in creating a word-of-mouth epidemic. But obviously, for that epidemic to take off, the restaurant itself had to remain a good restaurant.

And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of “stickiness.” Is the message—or the food, or the movie, or the product—memorable? Is it so memorable, in fact, that it can create change, that it can spur someone to action?

In the advertising world, direct marketers are the real students of stickiness, and some of the most intriguing conclusions about how to reach consumers have come from their work.

The gold box, Wunderman writes, “made the reader/viewer part of an interactive advertising system.

But they didn’t have that little final touch, that gold box, that would make their message stick.

In the advertising business, this surfeit of information is called the “clutter” problem, and clutter has made it harder and harder to get any one message to stick.