The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,77

for the elusive, indefinable quality known as cool.

At Lambesis, Gordon developed a network of young, savvy correspondents in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and Dallas and Seattle and around the world in places like Tokyo and London. These were the kind of people who would have been wearing Hush Puppies in the East Village in the early 1990s. They all fit a particular personality type: they were Innovators.

“These are kids who are outcasts in some way,” Gordon says. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually true. They feel that way. They always felt like they were different. If you ask kids what worries them, the trendsetter kids pick up on things like germ warfare, or terrorism. They pick up on bigger picture things, whereas the mainstream kids think about being overweight, or their grandparents dying, or how well they are doing in school. You see more activists in trendsetters. People with more passion. I’m looking for somebody who is an individual, who has definitely set herself apart from everybody else, who doesn’t look like their peers.”

Gordon has a kind of relentless curiosity about the world. “I’ve run into trendsetters who look completely Joe Regular Guy,” she went on. “I can see Joe Regular Guy at a club listening to some totally hard core band playing, and I say to myself, omigod, what’s that guy doing here, and that totally intrigues me, and I have to walk up to him and say, hey, you’re really into this band. What’s up? You know what I mean? I look at everything. If I see Joe Regular Guy sitting in a coffee shop and everyone around him has blue hair, I’m going to gravitate toward him because, hey, what’s Joe Regular Guy doing in a coffee shop with people with blue hair?”

With her stable of Innovator correspondents in place, Gordon would then go back to them two or three or four times a year, asking them what music they were listening to, what television shows they were watching, what clothes they were buying, or what their goals and aspirations were. The data were not always coherent. They required interpretation. Different ideas would pop up in different parts of the country, then sometimes move east to west or sometimes west to east. But by looking at the big picture, by comparing the data from Austin to Seattle and Seattle to Los Angeles and Los Angeles to New York, and watching it change from one month to the next, Gordon was able to develop a picture of the rise and movement of new trends across the country. And by comparing what her Innovators were saying and doing with what mainstream kids were saying and doing three months or six months or a year later, she was able to track what sorts of ideas were able to make the jump from the cool subcultures to the Majority.

“Take the whole men wearing makeup, the Kurt Cobain, androgynous thing,” Gordon said. “You know how he used to paint his fingernails with Magic Marker? We saw that in the Northwest first, then trickling through Los Angeles and New York and Austin because they have a hip music scene. Then it trickled into other parts of the country. That took a long time to go mainstream.”

Gordon’s findings became the template for the Airwalk campaign. If she found new trends or ideas or concepts that were catching fire among Innovators around the country, the firm would plant those same concepts in the Airwalk ads they were creating. Once, for example, Gordon picked up on the fact that trendsetters were developing a sudden interest in Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The influential rap band Beastie Boys were very publicly putting money into the Free Tibet campaign, and were bringing monks on stage at their concerts to give testimonials. “The Beastie Boys pushed that through and made it okay,” Gordon remembers. So Lambesis made a very funny Airwalk ad with a young Airwalk wearing monk sitting at a desk in a classroom writing a test. He’s looking down at his feet because he’s written cheat notes on the side of his shoes. (When a billboard version of the ad was put up in San Francisco, Lambesis was forced to take it down, after Tibetan monks protested that monks don’t touch their feet, let alone cheat on tests.) When James Bond started popping up on the trendsetter radar, Lambesis hired the director of the James Bond movies to film a series of commercials, all