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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of this process of translation comes from the study of rumors, which are—obviously—the mo...

If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then—whether it is of shoes or behavior or a piece of software—he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.

They have street savvy. I would say that they are unusually socially connected. They have a lot of contacts.... I would have to say the underlying motive is financial or economic. But there is definitely an interest in helping people out.”

She sometimes comes to New York and sits watching the sidewalks of Soho and the East Village for hours, photographing anything unusual. Gordon is a Maven—a Maven for the elusive, indefinable quality known as cool.

Gordon developed a network of young, savvy correspondents in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and Dallas and Seattle and around the world in places like Tokyo and London.

These were the kind of people who would have been wearing Hush Puppies in the East Village in the early 1990s. They all fit a particular ...

“These are kids who are outcasts in some way,” Gordon says. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually true. They feel that way. They ...

you ask kids what worries them, the trendsett...

bigger-picture things, whereas the mainstream kids think about being overweight, or their grandparents dying, or h...

People with more passion. I’m looking for somebody who is an individual, who has definitely set herself apart from everybody else...

Gordon has a kind of relentless curiosity a...

With her stable of Innovator correspondents in place, Gordon would then go back to them two or three or four times a year, asking them what music they were listening to, what television shows they were watching, what clothes they were buying, or what their goals and aspirations were. The data were not always coherent. They required interpretation.

Different ideas would pop up in different parts of the country, then sometimes move east to west or sometimes west to east. But by looking at the big picture, by comparing the data from Austin to Seattle and Seattle to Los Angeles and Los Angeles to New York, and watching it change from one month to the next, Gordon was able to develop a picture of the rise and movement of new trends across the country.

And by comparing what her Innovators were saying and doing with what mainstream kids were saying and doing three months or six months or a year later, she was able to track what sorts of ideas were able to ...

Gordon’s findings became the template for the Airwalk campaign. If she found new trends or ideas or concepts that were catching fire among Innovators around the country, the firm would plant those same concepts in the Airwalk ads they were creating.

Once, for example, Gordon picked up on the fact that trendsetters were developing a sudden interest in Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

“One time we noticed that the future technology thing was really big,” Gordon says. “You’d ask some kid what they would invent, if they could invent anything they wanted, and it was always about effortless living.

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...

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 w...

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.”

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 ...

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.

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?”

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?

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

The language of smoking, like the language of suicide, seems incredibly consistent. Here are two responses, both describing childhood memories: My mother smoked, and even though I hated it—hated the smell—she had these long tapered fingers and full, sort of crinkly lips, always with lipstick on, and when she smoked she looked so elegant and devil-may-care that there was no question that I’d smoke someday.

She thought people who didn’t smoke were kind of gutless. Makes you stink, makes you think, she would say, reveling in how ugly that sounded.

The draw for me was the badness of it, and the adult-ness, and the way it proved the idea that you could be more than one thing at once.

There is actually considerable support for this idea that there is a common personality to hard-core smokers. Hans Eysenck, the influential British psychologist, has argued that 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.

If you bundle all of these extroverts’ traits together—defiance, sexual precocity, honesty, impulsiveness, indifference to the opinion of others, sensation seeking—you come up with an almost perfect definition of the kind of person many adolescents are drawn to.

they weren’t cool because they smoked. They smoked because they were cool.

The very same character traits of rebelliousness and impulsivity and risk-taking and indifference to the opinion of others and precocity that made them so compelling to their adolescent peers also make it almost inevitable that they would also be drawn to the ultimate expression of adolescent rebellion, risk-taking, impulsivity, indifference to others, and precocity: the cigarette. This may seem like a simple point. But it is absolutely essential in understanding why the war on smoking has stumbled so badly.

that’s not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool.

Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the suicide epidemic in Micronesia began or word-of-mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began, because of the extraordinary influence of Pam P. and Billy G. and Maggie and their equivalents—the

In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group—a select few—are responsible for dr...

Of all the teenagers who experiment with cigarettes, only about a third ever go on to smoke regularly. Nicotine may be highly addictive, but it is only addictive in some people, some of the time.

“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.”