The Tipping Point

1
The Tipping Point
2
Three Rules of The Tipping Point

• 1. The Law of the Few
• 2. The Stickiness Factor
• 3. The Power of Context
• They provide a direction for how to go about
  reaching a tipping point.

3
The Law of the Few

• Connectors
• People with a special gift of bringing the world
  together SOCIAL GLUE SPREAD MESSAGE
• Mavens
• They accumulate knowledge and have the social
  skills to start word-of-mouth epidemics DATA
  BANKS PROVIDE THE MESSAGE
• Salesmen
• They persuade us

4
The Law of the Few

• Connectors
• Paul Revere vs. William Dawes
• Word of mouth is still the most important form of
  human communication (p. 32).
• Best bar / restaurant in town
• 53,000 American soldiers are buried in France. .
  .

5
The Stickiness Factor

• Your change models the theme is the stickiness
  factor
• Sesame Street vs. Blues Clues

6
The Power of Context

• Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and
  circumstances of the times and places in which
  they occur the context, p. 139
• Laser disk between CD and DVD
• Ethanol or fuel cells or ?
• Video/telephones

7
The Power of Context
Character is more like a bundle of habits and
tendencies and interests, loosely bound together
and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance
and context, p. 163. The convictions of your
heart and the actual contents of your thoughts
are less important, in the end, in guiding your
actions than the immediate context of your
behavior, p. 165. True in extreme
situations? True in work situations? True in
personal situations?
8
The Rules of The Tipping Point

• Making an idea or attitude or product tip can be
  done through the influence of special kinds of
  people. Thats the Law of the Few.
• It can be done by changing the content of
  communication, by making a message so memorable
  that it sticks in someones mind and compels them
  to action. That is the Stickiness Factor.
• But we need to remember that small changes in
  context can be just as important in tipping
  epidemics. Ch. 4

9
Change Agents

• Rosa Parks
• Martin Luther King Jr.

• Connectors
• Mavens
• Salesmen

10
Changees

• Seed Corn, TP, p. 197
• Innovators
• adventurous
• Early adopters
• opinion leaders
• Early majority
• big companies
• Late majority
• these 2 deliberate skeptical mass
• Laggards
• stragglers

• Cheese
• Sniff
• Scurry
• Haw
• Hem

11
Connectors, Mavens, Salesmen

• They are the translators
• They take ideas from innovators and get them
  understood and accepted by the masses
• To make an idea contagious, they level it,
  dropping extra details and exaggerating other
  details to give more meaning to the message

12
Contagion and Stickiness

• Contagiousness is in larger part a function of
  the messenger
• Stickiness is primarily a property of the
  message, p. 234

13
Smoking vs. Suicide

• Young people will experiment.
• But you cant experiment with suicide once is
  all it takes.
• Paying attention to the tipping points of the
  addiction process can lead to a less sticky form
  of smoking (nicotine threshold, depression, lure
  of who smokes).

14
Diabetes and Breast Cancer

• Change the context from Black churches to beauty
  salons
• Change the messenger to a long-term friend, the
  stylist
• Change the message to stories.

15
Lessons of the Tipping Point

• Starting epidemics requires concentrating
  resources on a few key areas.
• Concentrate resources on connectors, mavens, and
  salesmen (Law of the Few) p. 255-256.

16
Lessons of the Tipping Point

• The world does not accord with our intuition. We
  are powerfully influenced by our surroundings,
  our immediate context, and the personalities of
  those around us p. 258-259.
• With the slightest push in just the right place,
  the world can be tipped p. 259.

17
Afterword

• Isolation (Columbine)
• Immunity (email?)
• Finding mavens is difficult