The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,33

in the previous chapter, says that one critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger. A pair of shoes or a warning or an infection or a new movie can become highly contagious and tip simply by being associated with a particular kind of person. But in all those examples, I took it as given that the message itself was something that could be passed on. Paul Revere started a word of mouth epidemic with the phrase “The British are coming.” If he had instead gone on that midnight ride to tell people he was having a sale on the pewter mugs at his silversmith shop, even he, with all his enormous personal gifts, could not have galvanized the Massachusetts countryside.

Roger Horchow, likewise, faxed all his friends about the restaurant his daughter took him to, performing the first step in creating a word of mouth epidemic. But obviously, for that epidemic to take off, the restaurant itself had to remain a good restaurant. It had to be the kind of restaurant that made an impact on the people who ate there. In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of “stickiness.” Is the message—or the food, or the movie, or the product—memorable? Is it so memorable, in fact, that it can create change, that it can spur someone to action?

Stickiness sounds as if it should be straightforward. When most of us want to make sure what we say is remembered, we speak with emphasis. We talk loudly, and we repeat what we have to say over and over again. Marketers feel the same way. There is a maxim in the advertising business that an advertisement has to be seen at least six times before anyone will remember it. That’s a useful lesson for Coca Cola or Nike, who have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on marketing and can afford to saturate all forms of media with their message. But it’s not all that useful for, say, a group of people trying to spark a literacy epidemic with a small budget and one hour of programming on public television. Are there smaller, subtler, easier ways to make something stick?

Consider the field of direct marketing. A company buys an ad in a magazine or sends out a direct mailing with a coupon attached that they want the reader to clip and mail back to them with a check for their product. Reaching the consumer with the message is not the hard part of direct marketing. What is difficult is getting consumers to stop, read the advertisement, remember it, and then act on it. To figure out which ads work the best, direct marketers do extensive testing. They might create a dozen different versions of the same ad and run them simultaneously in a dozen different cities and compare the response rates to each. Conventional advertisers have preconceived ideas about what makes an advertisement work: humor, splashy graphics, a celebrity endorser. Direct marketers, by contrast, have few such preconceptions, because the number of coupons that are mailed back or the number of people who call in on an 800 number in response to a television commercial gives them an objective, iron clad measure of effectiveness. In the advertising world, direct marketers are the real students of stickiness, and some of the most intriguing conclusions about how to reach consumers have come from their work.

In the 1970s, for example, the legendary direct marketer Lester Wunderman had a showdown with the Madison Avenue firm McCann Erickson over the Columbia Record Club account. Columbia was then—as it is now—one of the largest mail order clubs in the world, and Wunderman had handled the company’s advertising since it was formed in the 1950s. Columbia decided, however, to hire McCann to come up with a series of television commercials to support the direct marketing print ads that Wunderman was creating. These were not late night commercials with a toll free 800 number. They were standard television spots designed simply to raise awareness. Understandably, Wunderman was upset. He had handled the Columbia account for twenty years and didn’t like the idea of losing even a small part of the business to a competitor. Nor was he convinced that McCann’s advertising would actually do Columbia any good. To settle the issue, he proposed a test. Columbia, he said, should run a