Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them." The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994--until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred--at the most?") began wearing the shoes.
These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. "What we are really saying," he writes, "is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." In modern marketing, this idea--that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends--is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you'll reach everyone else through them, basically for free. Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims "E-Fluentials" can "make or break a brand." According to MarketingVOX, an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billion is spent a year on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at 36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising. That's on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.
Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.
In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo --has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."
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Comments | 10
March 26, 2008 at 7:16pm
Benjamin WelchThis data is fascinating and well worth using. But this is only a piece of the overall puzzle. Both "Influentials" and "Accidental Influentials" exist and both have to be taken into account. No two campaigns should be exactly the same. And good old fashioned intuition is fantastic as well and adds passion and creativity to the process. But trusting your intuition to the point of ignoring all other factors is self-righteous and stupid. The same goes for data and statistics. The key is looking at all of them and using all the data available. People at the extreme ends of this debate will never do as well as the ones that take valuable data from both sides instead of arguing who was more right. The truth is in what works. So both sides have some truth. And I intend to use both to my advantage.
March 14, 2008 at 2:24pm
miro slodkieveryone has valid points
because they are all interrelated factors
if the network structure is configured in a certain way - then naturally the flow will have to follow the structure to certain degrees - therefore if there are choke points to overcome - ..well the rest is obvious.
the key points being made are that the circumstances have to permit the propagation - otherwise it takes a lot more resources to force a beachhead.
if the idea has merit and is presented in a memorable fashion - that induces the 'infected'
to pass along the idea - then it propagates
if the idea requires several exposures - the chances of propagation drop
if the idea is supported with 'mass' awareness/buzz then the idea can propagate for a period of time without the daisy chain
if the idea happens upon an early more conducive/receptive starting points that perchance has a wide following etc...then like a rock skipping on water - the propagation will spread farther/faster
if ...if.... if
at the end of this you still need the compelling 'infectious' idea/product/service
there are no free rides
there is no democracy of infections - the 'best' does not win unless it crosses over to mass media which gives everyone the chance to be exposed
cheers
Miro
BTW loved the article Clive - eagerly looking forward to more
http://miroslodki.wordpress.com
February 25, 2008 at 2:02pm
Jon ReisfeldThis article is well-written and provocative. The subject matter will challenge your preconceptions. It's just the kind of mental fodder we all need to stay sharp.
February 23, 2008 at 8:57pm
Paul DiPernaDylan, Carol, and Guy all make good points... Based on my experience in the nonprofit world, Context is King when it comes to social marketing and outreach. In practical terms, let's say I have a $5,000 budget to market a press release and report for a nonprofit organization. What is my strategy? I identify as many context-relevant membership organizations and other broadcast-potential organizations that are *most likely" interested in our topic... and the plan will be to utilize their broadcast and outreach power to spread the word about our research, poll, etc.. I consider these organizations (and most likely their Org Leadership, Communications Directors/VPs) as the influentials necessary to give my report street cred, so to speak, and extended shelf-life.. I hope that makes sense. I'd like to see the evidence that would say $5,000 spent on direct mail or random phone calls will produce the same number of sticky connections as tapping into the context-based influentials. Based on my experience, it is more cost-effective to do the latter than the former. I'm sure there are merits to Dunccan Watts' research- he is one of the most important social science scholars in America today- but I'd love to see these simulations translated into real world situations and stories.
February 18, 2008 at 9:01pm
Jeff SchmidtI think Carol really hit the main take-away of this excellent article.
The right idea/product etc... at the wrong time goes nowhere.
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