“Is The Tipping Point Toast?” asks the recent FastCompany article in which researcher duncan watts talks about his findings (and their less than exuberant reception) that expose the billion dollars a year marketers spend targeting “influentials” as a waste of money.

i am constantly repeating the phrase that “we buy the brands and products that we feel express aspects of our identity,” and this applies to ideas as well. we buy into and espouse the ideas that express aspects of who we are. our “intuition” in that sense, could be seen not so much a kind of internal tuning fork dinging to the tone of the universe, but rather an insidiously partial filter which evaluates the validity of information based on its compliance with our ingrained personal predispositions. for marketers–an avocation that calls for a particular breed of identity, of course–it’s no doubt easy to latch on to the idea that a select few influential individuals wield the capacity to push trends over the tipping point simply by their involvement in the process. after all, considering what we do it’s pretty “intuitive” for us, isn’t it?

from the fastcompany article:

Marketing has always relied heavily on instinct and intuition. Admen like to believe they’re creative geniuses, gifted at truffling out social trends (which is why, they hasten to point out, they’re irreplaceable). Joe Pilotta, research VP for a firm called Big Research, suspects marketers cling to their belief in Influentials partly because they’re lazy. They love the idea of needing to reach only a small group of people to “tip” a product, he says with a laugh. Plus, it strokes their egos: “Think about it. You’re saying, ‘I am in control–I am the biggest influencer, because I am going to influence the influencers!’ It’s an arrogance that only the corporate world could enjoy.”

which certainly makes ME wonder to what extent what we know–or believe we know–about the nature of how marketing is supposed to work is actually based on the the egos of CMOs as opposed to on actual social theory. how about you?

see, i think all of coolhunting is a ridiculous waste of time. there is no universal “cool” that exists out of context, and while i do believe strongly that marketers themselves are NEVER the demo, i also think that all of us are subject to the context of the cultures or communities of which we are a part. translation: cool matters not because it’s “cool” but because–and only if–it’s culturally relevant. and while relevance sounds a lot less sexy than its mistaken-identity doppelganger, cool, it’s relevance that “trends” are really about.

Watts decided to put the whole idea to the test by building another Sims-like computer simulation. He programmed a group of 10,000 people, all governed by a few simple interpersonal rules. Each was able to communicate with anyone nearby. With every contact, each had a small probability of “infecting” another. And each person also paid attention to what was happening around him: If lots of other people were adopting a trend, he would be more likely to join, and vice versa. The “people” in the virtual society had varying amounts of sociability–some were more connected than others. Watts designated the top 10% most-connected as Influentials; they could affect four times as many people as the average Joe. In essence, it was a virtual society run–in a very crude fashion–according to the rules laid out by thinkers like Gladwell and Keller.

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn’t the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn’t they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

i really like that phrase, so i’ll write it again: A trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded.

we buy the brands, products, ideas, political candidates, etc., etc., we feel express aspects of our identities. a trend’s success depends not on how COOL it is, but on how effectively it manages to express a common-enough identity aspect. in other words, one way to look at the success of the trend that is “The Tipping Point” itself is that it has managed to express an identity aspect shared by a whole lot of marketers. not because it was cool, perhaps not even because it was RIGHT, but simply because it resonated with a particular–and particularly widespread–identity.

perhaps instead of building databases of “trend-spotters,” “brand evangelists,” “influencers” or whatever else those agencies that are so proud of themselves for getting to sit at the “cool kids” table want to call them, a more useful application of money would be to research the dynamics of our ability to BE influenced. and when i say “our” i mean all of us, marketers included. because, after all, being human helps in the process of figuring out how to communicate to other humans.

and maybe i read it wrong, but to me gladwell’s book wasn’t ever really about some people being blessed with the ability to start trends better than others, but rather some people being more curious, and thereby simply ending up in the way of more trends. consider how many more things an “early adopter” tries out that NEVER take off than the average person? they don’t necessarily help more stuff tip, they just try more shit out. what? were you expecting a different model? if so, maybe you should stop saying the word “viral” so much. that might aid a perspective shift:

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”

so… “If influentials cannot tip a trend into existence–and if success in a networked society is quite random–what’s a poor marketer to do?” The article suggests that, “Since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible–and not waste money chasing “important” people.” and while i agree with this, I think the “ultimate irony” proposed at the end of the article is misleading:

“If you really buy [Watts’s research], the most effective way to pitch your idea is … mass marketing. And that is precisely what the wizards of Madison Avenue, presiding over our zillion-channel microniche market, have rejected as obsolete. “

cultural relevance–especially in a networked society–is not entirely as random as watts’s algorithmic computer simulations, and simply broadcasting a message doesn’t make it more relevant, but there is no special group of cultural gate-keepers that get to decide what’s going to be relevant and what’s not.

“I think that all books like The Tipping Point or articles by academics can ever do is uncover a little piece of the bigger picture, and one day–when we put all those pieces together–maybe we’ll have a shot at the truth.”
– Malcom Gladwell