How To Reach The “Tipping Point”

“The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,” published in 2000, is the debut book by Malcolm Gladwell. In order to understand why certain ideas, products, or behaviors are so contagious that they “spread like viruses do" while others don’t, Gladwell (2000) introduced and described the idea of the “Tipping Point” and the "three rules of the Tipping Point."

According to Gladwell (2000), “Tipping Point” is "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." In other words, when a message reaches the “Tipping Point,” it will spread like fire and start an epidemic. But how can we control and tip an epidemic? Gladwell introduced the "three rules of the Tipping Point" which are the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor and the Power of Context. He believes that following one, two, or three of these rules will largely raise the possibility of reaching the Tipping Point.

The Law of the Few can be better understood with the 80/20 Principle, 80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of people, which means a tiny amount of people do the majority of the work. It suggests that any successful social epidemic is actually spread by a handful of people “with a particular and rare set of social gifts" (Gladwell, 2000). These people, who help certain messages reach the Tipping Point and are critical to social epidemics, are divided into three categories: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.

Connectors, as Gladwell states, are indispensable in any social epidemic. They are people who have massive social networks and are willing to introduce people from different areas to each other. They "link us up with the world … and bringing the world together" (Gladwell, 2000). Gladwell suggests that although the number of Connectors is low, as long as the message is successfully delivered to them, they can spread the idea rapidly from one social group to the next and boost it to reach the Tipping Point. Therefore, Gladwell speculates that the reason why many products or ideas don’t start epidemics is because they never make their way to the Connectors. However, I disagree with this assumption. This book was published in 2000 when the internet was not yet well developed. Years later, the emergence of social media changed the communication and PR industries entirely. People spent more and more time on social media and communicated with people they didn’t even know, which was exactly the opposite of what they used to do: making connections with those who you had met and known well. Nowadays, because the internet connects people from all over the world and social media has a substantial impact on people’s daily lives, everyone can literally become a reporter or a Connector. Although some celebrities still have a greater influence and more followers than others, finding Connectors and making sure they get the message is not as necessary and essential as it used to be.

Mavens and Salesmen are the other two kinds of people who fit in the Law of the Few. According to Gladwell (2000), Mavens are "information specialists," or "people we rely upon to connect us with new information." They are people who accumulate and hoard information on one or several certain areas and love helping others to solve their problems. I totally agree with Gladwell - we both believe Mavens play an essential role in spreading messages since people trust them more than they trust advertisements. So, in order to get our message out effectively and steadily, we should first reach out to Mavens and gain their trust and support. Salesmen, just as its name suggests, are “persuaders” (Gladwell, 2000). They have incredible negotiation skills that make others want to agree with them unconsciously. As Gladwell (2000) and many psychological experiments suggest, “persuasion often works in ways that we don’t appreciate,” and nonverbal cues are as or more important than verbal cues. Simple and subtle physical movements, such as a smile or a nod, can have a profound effect on how we feel and think. In my opinion, Salesmen don't necessarily need to be salespeople in stores, but instead, we can all become Salesmen if we can follow these clues. In addition, public relations managers, who deal with not only external PR campaigns but internal communications, should also learn from Salesmen skills so they will be more persuasive and trustable.

As the Law of the Few talks about the importance of the messengers, the second rule of the Tipping Point, the Stickiness Factor, emphasizes that the content of the message matters as well. To determine whether your idea is sticky enough, you should decide if it’s memorable enough to make people take action. According to Gladwell, there are many different ways and factors to enhance the memorability: broadcast more often, add humor or splashy graphics, ask celebrities to endorse and so on. The Stickiness Factor seems easy to achieve; however, as the internet and technology develop, people receive much more information than they need every day and, as a result, are less likely to remember the message or take action. How to make an idea memorable has been a tough question for decades and there is never a clear and absolute answer. But Gladwell believes there is always a simple way to package and deliver the information that makes it irresistible, and we just need to find it. Therefore, I believe we should not only focus on the information itself, but do more experiments on our target audience to better understand what they need and what interests them the most.

The last but not least rule of the Tipping Point is the Power of Context. According to Gladwell (2000), “Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the time and places in which they occur.” In other words, the external environment has a strong and significant influence on the transmission of information, people’s behaviors and their inner feelings. Gladwell also introduces the Broken Window theory: if one window is broken and left unrepaired, more windows will be broken soon, because the broken window indicates that no one is in charge. The Broken Window theory suggests that epidemics and serious crimes are usually caused and tipped by subtle changes and minor problems, in the right context. For example, Gladwell argues that crime rates in New York City dropped since 1950because the city began removing graffiti from subway trains and clamping down on fare-dodging. Although later sociologists disagreed with this argument because there were many other socio-economic factors that likely influenced the situation, and Gladwell publicly conceded that he gave too much weight to a simplistic explanation, the Power of Context is still a practical rule that encourages us to pay more attention to the external environment and subtle changes.

Overall, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” is a great book that not only introduces the concepts of the “Tipping Point” and the "three rules of the Tipping Point," but provides many examples to support the author's statements. Although Gladwell didn’t take the internet development into account when he made the analysis due to the early publication, the book is still inspiring and worth every public relations practitioner’s reading.