The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,72

among teenagers in the world, and the number three footwear brand, behind Nike and Adidas. Somehow, within the space of a year or two, Airwalk was jolted out of its quiet equilibrium on the beaches of southern California. In the mid 1990s, Airwalk tipped.

The Tipping Point has been concerned so far with defining epidemics and explaining the principles of epidemic transmission. The experiences of Paul Revere and Sesame Street and crime in New York City and Gore Associates each illustrate one of the rules of Tipping Points. In everyday life, however, the problems and situations we face don’t always embody the principles of epidemics so neatly. In this section of the book, I’d like to look at less straightforward problems, and see how the idea of Mavens and Connectors and Stickiness and Context—either singly or in combination—helps to explain them.

Why, for example, did Airwalk tip? The short answer is that Lambesis came up with an inspired advertising campaign. At the start, working with only a small budget, the creative director of Lambesis, Chad Farmer, came up with a series of dramatic images—single photographs showing the Airwalk user relating to his shoes in some weird way. In one, a young man is wearing an Airwalk shoe on his head, with the laces hanging down like braids, as his laces are being cut by a barber. In another, a leather clad girl is holding up a shiny vinyl Airwalk shoe like a mirror and using it to apply lipstick. The ads were put on billboards and in “wild postings” on construction site walls and in alternative magazines. As Airwalk grew, Lambesis went into television. In one of the early Airwalk commercials, the camera pans across a bedroom floor littered with discarded clothing. It then settles under the bed, as the air is filled with grunting and puffing and noise of the bedsprings going up and down. Finally the camera comes out from under the bed and we see a young, slightly dazed looking youth, holding an Airwalk shoe in his hand, jumping up and down on his bed as he tries unsuccessfully to kill a spider on the ceiling. The ads were entirely visual, designed to appeal to youth all over the world. They were rich in detail and visually arresting. They all featured a truculent, slightly geeky anti hero. And they were funny, in a sophisticated way. This was great advertising; in the years since the first Airwalk ads appeared, the look and feel of that campaign has been copied again and again by other companies trying to be “cool.” The strength of the Lambesis campaign was in more than the look of their work, though. Airwalk tipped because its advertising was founded very explicitly on the principles of epidemic transmission.

1.

Perhaps the best way to understand what Lambesis did is to go back to what sociologists call the diffusion model, which is a detailed, academic way of looking at how a contagious idea or product or innovation moves through a population. One of the most famous diffusion studies is Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross’s analysis of the spread of hybrid seed corn in Greene County, Iowa, in the 1930s. The new corn seed was introduced in Iowa in 1928, and it was superior in every respect to the seed that had been used by farmers for decades before. But it wasn’t adopted all at once. Of the 259 farmers studied by Ryan and Gross, only a handful had started planting the new seed by 1932 and 1933. In 1934, 16 took the plunge. In 1935, 21 followed, then 36, and the year after that a whopping 61 and then 46, 36, 14, and 3, until by 1941, all but two of the 259 farmers studied were using the new seeds. In the language of diffusion research, the handful of farmers who started trying hybrid seed at the very beginning of the 1930s were the Innovators, the adventurous ones. The slightly larger group who were infected by them were the Early Adopters. They were the opinion leaders in the community, the respected, thoughtful people who watched and analyzed what those wild Innovators were doing and then followed suit. Then came the big bulge of farmers in 1936, 1937, and 1938, the Early Majority and the Late Majority, the deliberate and the skeptical mass, who would never try anything until the most respected of farmers had tried it first. They caught the seed virus and passed it on, finally, to the Laggards, the