The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,79

to the preexisting structure of feeling and thought characteristic of the members of the group among whom the rumor spread.” That’s just what Lambesis did. They took the cultural cues from the Innovators—cues that the mainstream kids may have seen but not been able to make sense of—and leveled, sharpened, and assimilated them into a more coherent form. They gave those cues a specific meaning that they did not have previously and packaged that new sensibility in the form of a pair of shoes. It can hardly be a surprise that the Airwalk rumor spread so quickly in 1995 and 1996.

4.

The Airwalk epidemic did not last. In 1997, the company’s sales began to falter. The firm had production problems and difficulty filling their orders. In critical locations, Airwalk failed to supply enough product for the back to school season, and its once loyal distributors began to turn against it. At the same time, the company began to lose that cutting edge sensibility that it had traded on for so long. “When Airwalk started, the product was directional and inventive. The shoes were very forward,” said Chad Farmer. “We maintained the trendsetter focus on the marketing. But the product began to slip. The company began to listen more and more to the sales staff and the product started to get that homogenized, mainstream look. Everybody loved the marketing. In focus groups that we do, they still talk about how they miss it. But the number one complaint is, what happened to the cool product?” Lambesis’s strategy was based on translating Innovator shoes for the Majority. But suddenly Airwalk wasn’t an Innovator shoe anymore. “We made another, critical mistake,” Lee Smith, the former president of Airwalk says. “We had a segmentation strategy, where the small, independent core skate shops—the three hundred boutiques around the country who really created us—had a certain product line that was exclusive to them. They didn’t want us to be in the mall. So what we did was, we segmented our product. We said to the core shops, you don’t have to compete with the malls. It worked out very well.” The boutiques were given the technical shoes: different designs, better materials, more padding, different cushioning systems, different rubber compounds, more expensive uppers. “We had a special signature model—the Tony Hawk—for skateboarding, which was a lot beefier and more durable. It would retail for about eighty dollars.” The shoes Airwalk distributed to Kinney’s or Champ’s or Foot Locker, meanwhile, were less elaborate and would retail for about $60. The Innovators always got to wear a different, more exclusive shoe than everyone else. The mainstream customer had the satisfaction of wearing the same brand as the cool kids.

But then, at the height of its success, Airwalk switched strategies. The company stopped giving the specialty shops their own shoes. “That’s when the trendsetters started to get a disregard for the brand,” says Farmer. “They started to go to their boutiques where they got their cool stuff, and they realized that everyone else could get the very same shoes at J C Penney.” Now, all of a sudden, Lambesis was translating the language of mainstream products for the mainstream. The epidemic was over.

“My category manager once asked me what happened,” Smith says, “and I told him, you ever see Forrest Gump? Stupid is as stupid does. Well, cool is as cool does. Cool brands treat people well, and we didn’t. I had personally promised some of those little shops that we would give them special product, then we changed our minds. That was the beginning. In that world, it all works on word of mouth. When we became bigger, that’s when we should have paid more attention to the details and kept a good buzz going, so when people said you guys are sellouts, you guys went mainstream, you suck, we could have said, you know what, we don’t. We had this little jewel of a brand, and little by little we sold that off into the mainstream, and once we had sold it all”—he paused—“so what? You buy a pair of our shoes. Why would you ever buy another?”

SEVEN

Case Study

SUICIDE, SMOKING,

AND THE SEARCH FOR

THE UNSTICKY CIGARETTE

Not long ago, on the South Pacific islands of Micronesia, a seventeen year old boy named Sima got into an argument with his father. He was staying with his family at his grandfather’s house when his father—a stern and demanding man—ordered him out of bed early one morning and told him to find a bamboo