Malcolm Gladwell (Part III)
In the age of COVID, in the middle of a pandemic, reading The Tipping Point acts as a high dose of drugs. There are so many ohh and ahh along the way. Stories are simple, finding out how something tips, and quickly widespread in an environment, but the lessons that we can apply from it are huge, especially for those that work in marketing. There are so many people don’t like the book, most of their arguments stated how outdated the book is in our current day of social media marketing, or how Gladwell doesn’t give out any tips and lessons to the reader like a self-help book, or how the book goes into too many details for such a simple social problem. Those are all true. But those are Gladwell way of writing. Most of his book, you can finish in one sit, about 4 hours of reading. What you get out from that four hours isn’t all the details that he gives us in the book. As a matter of fact, we will quickly forget those details right after reading the book. It is a self-answered big question that we will draw out, a perfect argument on a problem so later on, we can apply it in our life. I think that is also the way of all non-fiction books work. Because of that, in this review, I will give you my answer to the book’s big question from my point of view. I will go along with the book, give you some interesting stories that I remember, and summary of the lessons I get from it. There are some spoilers as always.
An epidemic, by the Oxford English Dictionary, is a sudden, widespread occurrence of an undesirable phenomenon. More commonly, an epidemic is a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time, like COVID-19 in its first appearance on Earth.
In the tipping point, we will talk about epidemics, but not just disease, there are ideas, trends, social behavior, when they cross their threshold, tips, and spread like a real epidemic, like COVID. There are three rules of the Tipping Point — the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context. They offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.
The law of a few talking about the factor, or the person that make something tips. Those are people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. They are a few. Before talking about that particular rule, the first lesson from this chapter would be, the minority is the reason for everything that happens, as, in the rule of 20–80, 20% of people make an event that affects the other 80% of other people.
“Those few people can be called Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. They are all around us. Yet we often fail to give them proper credit for the role they play in our lives.”
The connectors are the one the bring the world together. They know a lot of people, and they want to connect with them. Imagine you can count the number of your friends and try to step back to find out how you know them. There will be a friend that links to most of the other friends in your pool. That person is a connector. My friend — Sasha Mai, is a typical connector. Then come to the Mavens. They are people with knowledge about the product. They can give you a perfect review of a restaurant in town from the price range to the food quality. A maven is a connector with knowledge. “A connector might tell ten friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them might take his advice. A Maven might tell five people where to stay in L.A. but make the case for the hotel so emphatically that all of them would take his advice.” But a maven isn’t a persuader, a maven is information brokers, sharing and trading what they know. For the social epidemic to start, some people are going to have to be persuaded to do something. That is when a salesman comes in. A salesman is someone with the skills to persuade you when you are unconvinced of what you are hearing. How can a salesman do that? We know that emotions are contagious. A salesman can use his little movements of eyes, smile, a tiny nod to “spread the disease”. They know that nonverbal cues are more important than verbal cues. You won’t be able to tell because those movements are incredibly subtle.
Connectors, Mavens, and Salesman — You have to look for them if you want to expand your network, and to campaign your marketing event. The book gives an example of how Toyota did its finding. In 1990, then Lexus first introduced, the company realized that it had two minor problems that required a recall, even though Toyota told everyone about the quality, the reliability of their new brand. They decided to have a special recall. Instead of calling those car owners to drive their car to the mechanics, they send the mechanics to them. After done updating, they vacuum the car and fill the gas tank. Why Toyota did that? Why need to go that length to make that special effort. The key fact, though, was not the number of people affected by the recall, but the kind of people affected by the recall. Who, after all, are the few people willing to take a chance and buy a brand-new luxury model? They were car experts, people who take cars seriously, people who talk about cars, people whose friends ask them for advice about cars. They are car mavens. Toyota knows that and they set the Maven trap. If they could satisfy those people, they could kick start a word of mouth epidemic about the quality of their customer service. To this day, automotive publications still call it “the perfect recall.”
In the world of the pandemic nowadays, those few groups of people should also be the target. Who will have a high chance to go out and meet more people? Who will be an extrovert and enjoy their time in a bar, club? Who will be, in fact, the link to most of the COVID cases? Or patient zero, super spreader, as we have now called them. There will be someone that makes the disease tips. Who will take their risk to cross the border from China to Vietnam to play cards and travel? They are those who fit into “the law of the few”. If we can identify those people, and somehow, educate and impose strict rules on them about the pandemic, we might have stopped the second COVID wave.
The second factor for a social pandemic to spread is the stickiness factor. We can say that it is the quality of the virus itself. A few people can tip the pandemic, but for the disease to stay, the virus has to be strong. How can COVID spread throughout the globe that quick? Because it is a “perfect” virus. It spreads through the respiratory path, which is the easiest path for a virus to jump from one host to another. It doesn’t kill you yet, in fact, some people don’t even show symptoms at all. Of course, in the eyes of the virus, they don’t want to kill off their host. They want to stay on an alive body as long as possible, and what happens when it is in the environment without a host, on plastic, on a piece of metal, the virus can live for hours on those surfaces. The quality of the virus gives it the stickiness factor.
The same can go for a product. If you want your customer to keep buying it and advertise about it, you have to stick with your best quality.
The last factor of the epidemic is the power of context. Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur. “This much, I think, is relatively straightforward. But the lesson of the Power of Context is that we are more than just sensitive to changes in context.” We’re exquisitely sensitive to them. And the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than we might ordinarily suspect.
From the book, the first point of the power of context is an epidemic that can be tipped by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment. An example from the book is from the broken window theory. During the 1990s, violent crimes declined across the U.S. not because of a set of the new law, a police reform, or some fairy heroic steps. The theory is simple, if you fix broken windows in a bad neighborhood, crime will decline. The reason is criminals will see the good change in their environment, they will have less motivation to destroy it, or to commit a crime. The theory then is adapted and used in NYC, starting with cleaning the graffiti on subway trains, a small act but show significant declination results of criminal activity in the city tubes.
Another example is from the famous Stanford prison experiment. In that experiment, a mock prison at Stanford University basement was built. A group of good background people was chosen, at random. Half of them to be to be guards and were given uniforms and dark glasses and told that their responsibility was to keep order in the prison, the other half are prisoners. The experiment shows us how quickly those people change their behavior given the situation. It isn’t just the environment, the situation also strongly affects us, that there are instances where you can take normal people from good schools and happy families and good neighborhoods and powerfully affect their behavior merely by changing the immediate details of their situation.
We can see this by comparing the environment between the U.S. and Vietnam when coping with COVID. In the U.S., the politics, the people behavior making the health rules there are ridiculously hard to impose. Americans value their freedom. They aren’t easy to listen to when someone told them to wear a facemask. Americans value their privacy. It isn’t easy to track a person where they were and whom they met. Americans value individualism. They might act because it gives them benefits, not because of societal value. This is the perfect environment for the virus to spread. Things are the opposite in Vietnam.
Gladwell also gives us several cases study. One of them that I feel significant is the case of smokers. How do people start smoking? How can we compare the spreading of smokers among young people with the spreading of suicidal rates? Do people smoke because of the environment or because of genetic? How can we stop this epidemic? By affecting the smoker maven, by changing the stickiness factor, or changing the environment? This is a great story, if not the best story so far from the book. I’ve learned so many things from this case, that I think I will talk about it in another two additional paragraphs at the end of this review.
The tipping point is a book that you can talk about it within 10 minutes, or you can expand it into a few hours, depend on the way you want to deliver it. The main points of it are short and quite straightforward. This is also the reason it got many negative reviews. People ask how a simple story can be expanded into a book of almost 300 pages. However, if you can sit down, read through all the stories, to details, and try to think about it in our life, there are so many interesting lessons that we can use.
Additional review on the case of the smoking epidemic.
I pay more attention to this story because I have so many friends who are smokers. Among Vietnamese men, there are almost 50% that smoke. The rate goes higher, up to 70% when you move to big cities. That is an alarming number. That means when you pick up two random men on Hanoi streets, one of them is a smoker. There are so many bad health and financial effect associate with smoking. There are also so many campaigns to fight the spread of this baffling phenomenon. You can count: Restricting advertising, increasing tax against tobacco companies, talking about health on social media, television, news about the dangers of smoking. So far, they aren’t effective.
I lived with a smoker before. He said he knows everything bad about cigarettes, but he doesn’t care. He argues that smoking is his choice, he might die sooner, he might have lung cancer tomorrow, but he knows that at that moment in life, he is living it.
That is the first thing you can recognize about smokers. They are cool. People always say that smokers are cool because they smoked, they aren’t, they smoked because they are cool. It is their character traits. They have it in their gene, the traits of rebelliousness, impulsivity, risk-taking, indifference, and precocity. Those are a trait of the people who can perfectly fit into the law of a few. If those people have a cigarette on his fingers, other people will follow him. That is why the war on smoking is hard in the first place. “When I’m waiting at a traffic light and the light is red, sometimes I wonder whether I should cross and jaywalk,” “Then somebody else does it and so I do too. It’s a kind of imitation. I’m getting permission to act from someone else who is engaging in a deviant act. Is that a conscious decision? I can’t tell. Maybe afterward I could brood on the difference. But at the time I don’t know whether any of us knows how much of our decision is conscious and how much is unconscious. Human decisions are subtle and complicated and not very well understood.” If the first jaywalker has those cool traits in their blood, they will always be the ones that cross the road first.
Can we influence those traits? They are born with it, but what if we alter the environment in their homes, would it change their personality later in life? The answer is no. I am a bit surprised when reading this part because I always believe that parents have a huge impact on their children. I don’t mean the genes that they pass on to their offspring, I was thinking about the environment. After all, we can use education to change a person? Can’t we? For example. If we are filling our houses with books, would that create intellectually curious to our children?
There are studies of twins, about adopted children (The Colorado Adoption Project) that demonstrated the effect of the environment of the home on a child’s personality. The finding is quite extraordinary. The environment at home might matter, but genes are more important. I was shocked by this finding.
However, other studies strongly suggest that the environment plays a big role in shaping a child’s personality and intelligence. But the catch is, it isn’t the environment at home, or it has anything to do with parents. Children pick up those traits from society, from their peer group.
Whatever those findings are, the result is, as a future father and husband, I now value the old Vietnamese saying of “Lấy vợ xem tông, lấy chồng xem giống”.
It also shows that thwarting those cool kids from adolescents won’t work. Or in other words, those mavens, or salesmen, will always have their power of the law of a few. Should we give up on the war of smoking now?
We can also try to look into one more thing, the stickiness factor. Why smokers stay smoking. We now know that smoking releases dopamine and norepinephrine. These are chemicals that regulate mood and wellbeing, which contribute to feelings of confidence, mastery, and pleasure. Your brain releases the same chemicals when you eat something sweet when you have sex when you get a compliment. Dopamine is one hell of a drug, and nicotine in tobacco will help your brain to release them.
That is why a lot of smokers had a history of major depression. People with low self-esteem, an unhealthy and unhappy home life, or troubled kids at schools, they are easier to be a heavy smoker. Depression is, after all, the result of a problem in the production of those certain brain chemicals.
This is the reason why smoking is so hard to quit. When you quit smoking, you no longer get so much norepinephrine and dopamine, you get agitation and irritability. However, this is also a weak link of the smoking epidemic. If you can find something that replaces that norepinephrine, you don’t want to smoke any more. Some companies start providing drugs that will do just that. You can take the drug and begin quitting smoking. There are alternative methods too. You can also get those hormones by doing exercises, which is also release dopamine, you can go out to get more sunlight, you should go hiking, take care of your well-being, then it would be a lot easier to break your smoking habit.