Well done Malcolm Gladwell for stringing together over 250 pages of common sense rambling with some supposedly relevant research to create a national bestseller. First of all, I want to praise Gladwell’s writing, because regardless of the content, the book is well written. I would expect nothing less from a staff writer for The New Yorker. I always find it difficult to criticize something that has received so much praise and success. Who am I to say the popular opinion is wrong? I don’t read very much, I have little background in the principles Gladwell is examining and I only read the book once and therefore could only take it in on a surface level. I will do my best to strip down the basic concepts of “The Tipping Point” and point out the flaws in his tips.
“The Tipping Point” explains how phenomena, epidemics and trends explode from simple ideas and everyday sources. The root of these explosions can be traced back to three different kinds of people: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen and three situational characteristic: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context. He opens the book with the loveable and memorable story of Hush Puppies, a small shoe company that went mainstream thanks to some indie trendsetters. This anecdote got me hooked, mostly because as a child my next door neighbor worked for Hush Puppies during their explosion into popularity. The droopy eyed dog mascot that could be found all over their house is permanently embedded into my psyche. For nostalgia and simplicity sake, I will continue with this example as I attempt to delegitimize the ideas Gladwell presents as groundbreaking and innovative.
First, I will look at his theory of the Law of the Few and the people that spread epidemics. The idea here is it only requires a small amount of people for an idea to tip, but the types of people that the ideas initially reaches are what is important. In the story of the Hush Puppies tip, Gladwell says a few trendy kids in the East Village and Soho neighborhood of Manhattan started wearing the shoes as part of their alternative fashion sense and the trend spread to designers and then all over the country. By his theory, in order for an idea to tip it needs to be touched by a connector: a naturally social person who knows a lot of people, a maven: an expert in a certain field with credibility, and a salesperson: a particularly persuasive individual. Theoretically, a pair of Hush Puppies could have landed in the hands of any of these types of people, and probably did. Some connector in the East Villiage bought a pair and his abundance of friends saw, one of these friends was a maven in the fashion industry who gave credibility to these shows, and another friend may have been a salesperson able to convince others to buy the shoes as well. Bam, a trend is set. Seems simple, but maybe it’s a little too simple. Gladwell takes the facts of this story and twists them to apply to his theory, while ignoring others. The shoes could have fallen into the hands of any of these people somewhere besides New York and the idea never would have tipped, and Hush Puppies would remain another dying shoe company with a limited market appeal. Or if the Hush Puppies trend still began in New York, but once they fell into the hand of the mainstream designers the public didn’t buy it. Gladwell does a good job of explaining why things that have tipped tipped, but conversely I am sure there a hundreds of trends that could have happened the same way that did not tip. He is exploring the foundation of the indie movement. He is looking at one trend (a brand of shoes) within the larger fashion world that I do not think he understands. He somewhat addresses this issue later when he talks about the idea of coolness in regards to teenage smoking. A cool person is someone that does not follow the norm that takes something old and makes it exciting because it is different. Gladwell presents this idea as new itself, trying to make it or himself cool, but the concept is as old as time. People strive to be different and unique, and the wearers of Hush Puppies were only trying to do that. I see the Hush Puppies trend as nothing more than a fluke.
Gladwell’s next supposedly revolutionary idea is the Stickiness Factor, tweaking the way an idea is present to make it memorable and clearly presented. Um, well, obviously everyone who has an idea wants to share it in a manner that people will remember it! In this chapter he throws a lot of psychology at the reader, a quite sticky trick, but I think it’s just hot air. His case study for this factor is children’s television, which works well because there is a lot of research and the attention span of children is easier to research than adults. Once again, Gladwell takes an idea that proves his theory and applies it, but fails to do the reverse and prove his greater theory can apply to anything else. Going back to the Hush Puppies case study, the stickiness factor here would be similar to the coolness factor. The shoes were presented in a way that made them appealing to the fashion conscientious public. How this idea is any different than what forms the billion-dollar advertising industry is beyond me. I think Gladwell is trying to simplify and idea by ignoring the bigger picture. Advertisers dedicate their lives to study how to package products to make them appealing, but it is not as simple as making it “irresistible” to the public, as Gladwell states. The same concepts that works for the products Gladwell called sticky, such as Hush Puppies, could be applied the same way to a different product and it would not tip. The market and consumers are much more complex than the psychological tidbits Gladwell attempts to force upon them. If he went back to the same stores where the Hush Puppies trend began, he will find dozens of trends that only still exist in that limited market and never tipped. What made Hush Puppies sticky and not a different brand of shoes? On a similar note, Gladwell can look at dozens of trends that tipped for reasons that’s fall outside of his golden rules such as popular fashion designers, for example, or magazines such as Vogue. Trends are created and spread like wildfire after being introduces by one of these sources and psychology has little to do with it. People buy a new Louis Vitton bag because it’s an expensive status symbol, and they model their wardrobe after the spring lineup in Vogue for no other reason than because Vogue says so. Maybe certain products benefit from a stickiness factor, but most of the time it is less formulaic.
The final concept is The Law of Context is probably to most ridiculous and farfetched of the bunch. Once again Gladwell pushes the psychology button too far. He goes on about the Good Samaritan theory and the law of 150, both very interesting psychological concepts, but too widely applied to his underlying idea. The factor that does hold some water is his emphasis on the important of environmental factors and peer pressure. This applies perfectly to my ideas about The Hush Puppies tip. The Hush Puppy trend could only have tipped in Ney York during the mid-1990s, the environment was right for that trends to start end evolve, oh, if only this is what Gladwell means when he writes about environment. Nope, he has to make it much more complicated and less applicable. Gladwell explains that tiny differences in the environment have a greater impact than big changes. The example he uses is the crime epidemic, and how cleaning graffiti and making basic repairs decreased crime in New York City. That’s great and it is probably correct, but once again, is it relevant? The hipster atmosphere that surrounded the Hush Puppies movement may have contributed to the creation of the trend because it brought the trendy people together, but it cannot be credited for producing the trend or even catalyzing it. Despite taking up two chapters of the book I’m still not entirely sure what the Law of Context is. Which, I suppose is the underlying theme of the entire book: a lot of smart sounding writing with little substance. It is well researched, that is undeniable, but poorly executed. I think the problem lies in the fact that the concept was not clearly defined to start, so Gladwell, in his attempt to turn a half baked idea into a book, threw together as many facts as he could that sort of fit, and then sought out case studies that proved his “theories.” I look back to the cover of the book for some direction, “how little things can make a difference.” Yes, Gladwell, they can, of course they can, anyone who has spent any time thinking about life and how events come to be or events that have passed can tell you that, but the important question he failed to answer is how, why and if the little things are any more significant than the big ones.
Altogether, Gladwell’s ideas make an over-complicated how-to guide for sparking some trends and epidemics, but the book as a whole, I feel, fails at being relevant or meaningful. So, yes, well done Mr. Gladwell, if only you had included a chapter on how you got “The Tipping Point” to tip. Maybe then, wannabe authors with actually innovative ideas could get their work into the public eye.
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