The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,22
in graduate school, a man so memorable that his personality serves as the basis for what is now an entire field of research in the marketing world.
“I was doing my Ph.D. at the University of Texas,” Price said. “At the time I didn’t realize it, but I met the perfect Maven. He’s Jewish and it was Easter and I was looking for a ham and I asked him. And he said, well, you know I am Jewish, but here’s the deli you should go to and here’s the price you should pay.” Price started laughing at the memory. “You should look him up. His name is Mark Alpert.”
7.
Mark Alpert is a slender, energetic man in his fifties. He has dark hair and a prominent nose and two small, burning, intelligent eyes. He talks quickly and precisely and with absolute authority. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t say that it was hot yesterday. He would say that we had a high of 87 degrees yesterday. He doesn’t walk up stairs. He runs up them, like a small boy. He gives the sense that he is interested in and curious about everything, that, even at his age, if you gave him a children’s chemistry set he would happily sit down right then and there and create some strange new concoction.
Alpert grew up in the Midwest, the son of a man who ran the first discount store in northern Minnesota. He got his doctorate from the University of Southern California and now teaches at the University of Texas School of Business Administration. But there is really no connection between his status as an economist and his Mavenism. Were Alpert a plumber, he would be just as exacting and thorough and knowledgeable about the ways of the marketplace.
We met over lunch at a restaurant on the lakefront in Austin. I got there first and chose a table. He got there second and persuaded me to move to another table, which he said was better. It was. I asked him about how he buys whatever he buys, and he began to talk. He explained why he has cable TV, as opposed to a dish. He gave me the inside scoop on Leonard Maltin’s new movie guide. He gave me the name of a contact at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan who is very helpful in getting a great deal. (“Malcolm, the hotel is ninety nine dollars. And the rack rate is a hundred and eighty nine dollars!”) He explained what a rack rate is. (The initial, but soft, retail asking price for a hotel room.) He pointed at my tape recorder. “I think your tape is finished,” he said. It was. He explained why I should not buy an Audi. (“They’re Germans, so it’s a pain dealing with them. For a while they would give you an under the counter warranty, but they don’t anymore. The dealer network is small, so it’s hard to get service. I love driving them. I don’t like owning them.” What I should drive, he told me, is a Mercury Mystique because they drive like a much more expensive European sedan. “They aren’t selling well, so you can get a good deal. You go to a fleet buyer. You go in on the twenty fifth of the month. You know this...”) Then he launched into an impossibly long, sometimes hilarious, description of the several months he took to buy a new TV. If you or I had gone through the same experience—which involved sending televisions back, and laborious comparison of the tiniest electronic details and warranty fine print—I suspect we would have found it hellish. Alpert, apparently, found it exhilarating. Mavens, according to Price, are the kinds of people who are avid readers of Consumer Reports. Alpert is the kind of Maven who writes to Consumer Reports to correct them. “One time they said that the Audi 4000 was based on the Volkswagen Dasher. This was the late 1970s. But the Audi 4000 is a bigger car. I wrote them a letter. Then there was the Audi 5000 fiasco. Consumer Reports put them on their list of thou shalt not buy because of this sudden acceleration problem. But I read up on the problem in the literature and came to believe it was bogus....So I wrote them and I said, you really ought to look into this. I gave them some information to consider. But I didn’t hear back from them. It annoyed the hell out of me.