The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,35

none of the subjects—a mere 3 percent—had actually gone to the health center to get inoculated. For some reason, the students had forgotten everything they had learned about tetanus, and the lessons they had been told weren’t translating into action. The experiment didn’t stick. Why not?

If we didn’t know about the Stickiness Factor, we probably would conclude that something was wrong with the way the booklet explained tetanus to the students. We might wonder whether trying to scare them was the appropriate direction to take, whether there was a social stigma surrounding tetanus that inhibited students from admitting that they were at risk, or perhaps that medical care itself was intimidating to students. In any case, that only 3 percent of students responded suggested that there was a long way to go to reach the goal. But the Stickiness Factor suggests something quite different. It suggests that the problem probably wasn’t with the overall conception of the message at all, and that maybe all the campaign needed was a little gold box. Sure enough, when Levanthal redid the experiment, one small change was sufficient to tip the vaccination rate up to 28 percent. It was simply including a map of the campus, with the university health building circled and the times that shots were available clearly listed.

There are two interesting results of this study. The first is that of the 28 percent who got inoculated, an equal number were from the high fear and the low fear group. Whatever extra persuasive muscle was found in the high fear booklet was clearly irrelevant. The students knew, without seeing gory pictures, what the dangers of tetanus were, and what they ought to be doing. The second interesting thing is that, of course, as seniors they must have already known where the health center was, and doubtless had visited it several times already. It is doubtful that any of them would ever actually have used the map. In other words, what the tetanus intervention needed in order to tip was not an avalanche of new or additional information. What it needed was a subtle but significant change in presentation. The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and the times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk—a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career—to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable.

There are enormous implications in Levanthal’s fear experiments and Wunderman’s work for Columbia Records for the question of how to start and tip social epidemics. We have become, in our society, overwhelmed by people clamoring for our attention. In just the past decade, the time devoted to advertisements in a typical hour of network television has grown from six minutes to nine minutes, and it continues to climb every year. The New York–based firm Media Dynamics estimates that the average American is now exposed to 254 different commercial messages in a day, up nearly 25 percent since the mid 1970s. There are now millions of web sites on the Internet, cable systems routinely carry over 50 channels of programming, and a glance inside the magazine section of any bookstore will tell you that there are thousands of magazines coming out each week and month, chock full of advertising and information. In the advertising business, this surfeit of information is called the “clutter” problem, and clutter has made it harder and harder to get any one message to stick. Coca Cola paid $33 million for the rights to sponsor the 1992 Olympics, but despite a huge advertising push, only about 12 percent of TV viewers realized that they were the official Olympic soft drink, and another 5 percent thought that Pepsi was the real sponsor. According to a study done by one advertising research firm, whenever there are at least four different 15 second commercials in a two and a half minute commercial time out, the effectiveness of any one 15 second ad sinks to almost zero. Much of what we are told or read or watch, we simply don’t remember. The information age has created a stickiness problem. But Levanthal and Wunderman’s examples suggest that there may be simple ways to enhance stickiness and systematically engineer stickiness into a message. This is a fact of obvious importance to marketers, teachers, and managers. Perhaps