The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,21

knowledge. In recent years, economists have spent a great deal of time studying Mavens, for the obvious reason that if marketplaces depend on information, the people with the most information must be the most important. For example, sometimes when a supermarket wants to increase sales of a given product, they’ll put a promotion sticker in front of it, saying something like “Everyday Low Price!” The price will stay the same. The product will just be featured more prominently. When they do that, supermarkets find that invariably the sales of the product will go through the roof, the same way they would if the product had actually been put on sale.

This is, when you think about it, a potentially disturbing piece of information. The whole premise behind sales, or supermarket specials, is that we, as consumers, are very aware of the prices of things and will react accordingly: we buy more in response to lower prices and less in response to higher prices. But if we’ll buy more of something even if the price hasn’t been lowered, then what’s to stop supermarkets from never lowering their prices? What’s to stop them from cheating us with meaningless “everyday low price” signs every time we walk in? The answer is that although most of us don’t look at prices, every retailer knows that a very small number of people do, and if they find something amiss—a promotion that’s not really a promotion—they’ll do something about it. If a store tried to pull the sales stunt too often, these are the people who would figure it out and complain to management and tell their friends and acquaintances to avoid the store. These are the people who keep the marketplace honest. In the ten years or so since this group was first identified, economists have gone to great lengths to understand them. They have found them in every walk of life and in every socioeconomic group. One name for them is “price vigilantes.” The other, more common, name for them is “Market Mavens.”

Linda Price, a marketing professor at the University of Nebraska and a pioneer in Maven research, has made videotapes of interviews she’s done with a number of Mavens. In one, a very well dressed man talks with great animation about how he goes about shopping. Here is the segment, in full:

Because I follow the financial pages closely, I start to see trends. A classic example is with coffee. When the first coffee crunch came ten years ago, I had been following the thing about Brazilian frost and what it would do to the long term price of coffee, and so I said I’m going to stockpile coffee.

At this point in the interview, an enormous smile breaks across the man’s face.

I ended up with probably somewhere between thirty five and forty cans of coffee. And I got them at these ridiculous prices, when the three pound cans were $2.79 and $2.89....Today it’s about $6 for a three pound can. I had fun doing that.

Do you see the level of obsession here? He can remember prices, to the cents, of cans of coffee he bought ten years ago.

The critical thing about Mavens, though, is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. It isn’t just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too. “A Maven is a person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This person likes to initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests,” Price says. “They like to be helpers in the marketplace. They distribute coupons. They take you shopping. They go shopping for you....They distribute about four times as many coupons as other people. This is the person who connects people to the marketplace and has the inside scoop on the marketplace. They know where the bathroom is in retail stores. That’s the kind of knowledge they have.” They are more than experts. An expert, says Price, will “talk about, say, cars because they love cars. But they don’t talk about cars because they love you, and want to help you with your decision. The Market Maven will. They are more socially motivated.”

Price says that well over half of Americans know a Maven, or someone close to the Maven’s description. She herself, in fact, based the concept around someone she met when she was