The anti-Tipping Point

Whether you've embraced the Tipping Point and the power of Influencers to your heart, or find yourself more of a Herd-er by instinct, you should probably get yourself over to Fast Company. There's an article on the work of Duncan Watts (Is The Tipping Point Toast), and his premise that Influencers are no more influential when it comes to trends than the typical man or woman on the street.

I've covered Duncan's work before, but this is a very robust attack on some of the most basic foundations of word of mouth thinking. He's not saying the WOM doesn't work (anything but), just that the whole thing is way more random than the simplistic 'find the influencers' model currently employed.

At the end of the day, it's probably six of one, and half a dozen of the other. But well worth a read.

Comments

[Greg Stielstra]

I believe Watts and Keller have landed on either side of the truth.

Watts claims the "accidental influential" who could be anyone for any product. They are average people with average connectivity. Trends, Watts believes, rely on society's receptivity to a new product or idea and not upon the special qualities of the inaugural messengers. Thus, success depends instead on random chance and so smart advertisers should increase their odds by blasting away with mass marketing and wait to see what sticks.

Keller, by contrast, casts his lot with the "Influentials." In his view every trend begins with the same group of special people no matter the product. Influentials are well-read and highly connected and these qualities impart prodigious persuasive powers.

Both men, however, miss a fundamental truth; Trends must start before they can spread. Therefore the receptivity of the first individuals to learn of a new product play a key role in determining its fate. If they buy then a trend has a chance to develop. If they don’t then the party is over.

The problem with influentials and accidental influentials is that we don’t know whether they are likely or unlikely to buy the promoted product. By Watts’s view we are all equally likely to start a needle pointing trend as a fad involving death metal garage bands. For his part, Keller believes that both of those trends would always begin with the same group of people. But if you consider your own behavior for even a moment you realize this can’t be true.

I believe the best way to understand the marketing process—the way messages are sent, received, acted upon, and spread, is to think of fire. I saw these forces in action when I worked as the marketing director for The Purpose Driven Life, the bestselling hardcover book in American history and describe my observations in a book called PyroMarketing. (www.pyromarketing.com)

Trends begin with a group of people I call “The Driest Tinder.” It is their passion not their position that makes them special. They have what Watt’s would call a “low adoption threshold.” This means they are more likely to buy your product or service than the population at large. Since they are more likely to buy, they are also more likely to start a trend.

Next, and perhaps most importantly, the driest tinder possess a special kind of connectivity. They are no more connected than the rest of us but their friends and associates share their “low adoption threshold” for the same product thanks to a human psychological force called homophily. Homophily means “love of same” and it describes our tendency to gather with similar others into affiliation networks. Packers fans seek out other Packers fans and so on. Affiliation networks allow us to identify and communicate with what Watt’s calls “percolating vulnerable clusters” or, groups of people who know each other and share a low adoption threshold.

For The Purpose Driven Life those groups were 1200 churches across the United States that adopted the 40 Days of Purpose campaign and together read Rick Warren’s book over a concentrated period. From there the fire spread from church to church and beyond until the book had sold 30 million copies in just three years.

The combination of the driest tinder’s receptivity to a particular product and their connectivity to like-minded others make them the place where trends begin. Duncan Watts was right about one thing though; trends are more like forest fires.

[Mark Earls]

Thanks for the link, mate. And for the comment.

Just wanted to say that the point is that Duncan's analysis (and ours) shows how little you need the notion of influentials to explain spread. So - sorry - think one does have to choose.

Also, Greg's comment here makes a couple of important errors:

1. Duncan's point is not to blast away with Mass media but to acknowledge first how few things take off in popularity and thus to try a number of bets rather than just the one...

2. Greg's tinder model makes the mistake of ignoring all of the sparks which get tinder smouldering but never catch-a-fire (as the marvellous Mr Marley called it). In all aspects of human behaviour there are at any time lots of new and unusual things being done by a small number of individuals which never get taken up by their peers. It's only in retrospect that the ones that do take off seem winners. The Black Swan explains this well but the important thing is that we can't tell at the beginning which will take off.

3. Greg is right of course that it's not just one group doing all the innovating but (I suspect) wrong to assume that low levels of adoption threshold are the key: too low a level of adoption will make them open to all kinds of new ideas and thus generate heavy turnover in adoption and no trend

4. What is useful is to flip our thinking from those who do the influencing to those who are ready to be influenced: in this Greg's comment would fit neatly with how I think Duncan and the rest of us are trying to get folk to approach this.

The big problem for all of us is that it's hard to turn one of the many minority behaviours into one of few adopted by the majority. The natural mechanisms that Duncan and co describe suggest that this is largely random; our job is to give ourselves the best chance of it being otherwise (although as ever, marketing is likely to be a secondary driver of behaviour and not a big strong primary one!)

Keep up the good word

[mark Earls]

"Good WORK" that should be. Ooops

[Greg Stielstra]

Good thoughts Mark. In response I would add...

I think the minority-to-majority chasm gets crossed by social proof in response to excessive choice. Here's what I mean.

Ordinarily we choose products from within what economists call "the transaction." We compare our preferences with the available alternatives and choose the best fit. But as choice increases it gets harder to understand our alternatives. When that happens people often reach beyond the transaction to decision externalities. In other words, like cheating on a test, they stop trying to solve the problem themselves and begin copying their neighbor's choice.

Today we face bewildering choice. In 2003 alone, 26,000 new food and household products were introduced; 115 new deodorants, 187 new breakfast cereals, and 303 new women's perfumes. This, I believe, decreases people's ability to choose independently and increases people's reliance on social proof. As fewer and fewer people are equipped to make independent, rational choices, those who can become more valuable to the marketing process since they are the only ones equipped to start a trend.

This divides markets into initiators and imitators. Initiators are those equipped to choose independently. Imitators must wait for them to choose so they can follow their lead.

It's probably an oversimplification, but I think it describes a trend that is generally true and which marketers must acknowledge and accommodate.

Spread the fire. GS