The Tipping Point – The Three Rules of Epidemics

Written by Cut Haji Muna Kartika
Wednesday, 20 February 2008 This book called The Tipping Point – How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell tells us about how little things can make a big difference. This fascinating book will make you see the world in a different way.

In this second section, we would like to share with you about three rules of epidemics.
The three rules of the Tipping point – the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context – offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.

The Law of The Few

Success of any kind of epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with particular and rare set of social gifts. They are what we called Connectors, Maven, and Salesmen.

Connectors are those people who link us up with the world, who bridge you and your friends, who introduce us to our social circles (these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize), people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

What makes someone a Connector? The first – and most obvious – criterion is that Connectors know lots of people. They are kind of people who know everyone. All of us know someone like this. But I don’t think that we spend a lot of time thinking about the importance of these kind of people. I’m not even sure that most of us really believe that the kind of person who knows everyone really knows everyone. But they do.

Connectors are important because their word-of mouth created epidemics. Word-of-mouth created not by Connectors won’t have big effect like what happened in Tipping point.

Second group of people who control the word-of-mouth epidemics are what we called Maven. The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge. In recent years, economists have spent a great deal of time studying Mavens, for the obvious reason that if marketplaces depend on information, the people with the most information must be the most important.

Mavens are passive collectors of information. A person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This is the person who connects people to the marketplace and has the inside scoop on the marketplace. They are more than experts. An expert, say cars because he/she loves cars. Expert doesn’t talk about cars because he/she loves you, and wants to help you with your decision. The market Maven will. They are more socially motivated to help other with information they know about the products in the markets.

The one thing that Maven is not is a persuader. Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know. For a social epidemic to start, though, some people are actually going to have to be persuaded to do something. Mavens are data banks. 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.

The Stickiness Factor

In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of “stickiness”. Is the message memorable? Is it so memorable, in fact, that it can create change, that it can spur someone to action?

Stickiness sounds as if it should be straightforward. When most of us want to make sure what we say is remembered, we speak with emphasis. We talk loudly, and we repeat what we have to say over and over again. Marketers feel the same way. There is a maxim in the advertising business that an advertisement has to be seen at least six times before anyone will remember it.

The law of the few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

The Power of Context

Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur. People are more than just sensitive to changes in context. People are exquisitely sensitive to them. And the kind of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than we might ordinarily suspect.

With small changes of context, people will get changes in big things. Epidemics can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of immediate environment.

Based on : The Tipping Point

By: Malcolm Gladwell