The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,78

of which featured Airwalk clad characters making wild escapes from faceless villains. When trendsetters started to show an ironic interest in country club culture, and began wearing old Fred Perry and Izod golf shirts, Airwalk made a shoe out of tennis ball material and Lambesis made a print ad of the shoe being thrown up in the air and hit with a tennis racket. “One time we noticed that the future technology thing was really big,” Gordon says. “You’d ask some kid what they would invent, if they could invent anything they wanted, and it was always about effortless living. You know, put your head in a bubble, push a button, and it comes out perfect. So we got Airwalk to do these rounded, bubbly outsoles for the shoes. We started mixing materials—meshes and breathable materials and special types of Gore Tex and laying them on top of each other.” To look through the inventory of Airwalk ads in that critical period, in fact, is to get a complete guide to the fads and infatuations and interests of the youth culture of the era: there are 30 second spoofs of kung fu movies, a TV spot on Beat poetry, an X-files–style commercial in which a young man driving into Roswell, New Mexico, has his Airwalks confiscated by aliens.

There are two explanations for why this strategy was so successful. The first is obvious. Lambesis was picking on various, very contagious, trends while they were still in their infancy. By the time their new ad campaign and the shoes to go along with it were ready, that trend (with luck) would just be hitting the mainstream. Lambesis, in other words, was piggy backing on social epidemics, associating Airwalk with each new trend wave that swept through youth culture. “It’s all about timing,” Gordon says. “You follow the trendsetters. You see what they are doing. It takes a year to produce those shoes. By the time the year goes, if your trend is the right trend, it’s going to hit those mainstream people at the right time. So if you see future technology as a trend—if you see enough trendsetters in enough cities buying things that are ergonomic in design, or shoes that are jacked up, or little Palm Pilots, and when you ask them to invent something, they’re all talking about flying cars of the future—that’s going to lead you to believe that within six months to a year everyone and his grandmother will be into the same thing.”

Lambesis wasn’t just a passive observer in this process, however. It is also the case that their ads helped to tip the ideas they were discovering among Innovators. Gordon says, for example, that when something fails to make it out of the trendsetter community into the mainstream, it’s usually because the idea doesn’t root itself broadly enough in the culture: “There aren’t enough cues. You didn’t see it in music and film and art and fashion. Usually, if something’s going to make it, you’ll see that thread running throughout everything—through what they like on TV, what they want to invent, what they want to listen to, even the materials they want to wear. It’s everywhere. But if something doesn’t make it, you’ll only see it in one of those areas.” Lambesis was taking certain ideas, and planting them everywhere. And as they planted them, they provided that critical translation. Gordon’s research showed that Innovator kids were heavily into the Dalai Lama and all of the very serious issues raised by the occupation of Tibet. So Lambesis took one very simple reference to that—a Tibetan monk—and put him in a funny, slightly cheeky situation. They tweaked it. The Innovators had a heavily ironic interest in country club culture. Lambesis lightened that. They made the shoe into a tennis ball, and that made the reference less arch and more funny. Innovators were into kung fu movies. So Lambesis made a kung fu parody ad in which the Airwalk hero fights off martial arts villains with his skateboard. Lambesis took the kung fu motif and merged it with youth culture. In the case of the Chinese scholar’s vacation, according to Allport, the facts of the situation didn’t make sense to the people of the town;so they came up with an interpretation that did make sense—that the scholar was a spy—and, to make that new interpretation work, “discordant details were leveled out, incidents were sharpened to fit the chosen theme, and the episode as a whole was assimilated