One absent-minded United Nations security guard may have unwittingly helped coordinate one of the most outrageous and concerning marketing stunts of this year. Colonel Sanders, mustachioed (and deceased) spokesperson for chicken-enthusiast restaurant KFC, was pictured shaking hands with President of the General Assembly Dr. Ali A. Treki inside a secure UN diplomat lounge.
This blog post is a follow-up to my Monday post, The Law of the Few. Today, I will be sharing more highlights from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, more specifically, his thoughts on what he calls “The Stickiness Factor.” The Stickiness Factor suggests that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable. There are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.
Gladwell references numerous studies in marketing and television to conclude that advice needs to be practical and personal in order to become memorable. For example, the addition of a map of the campus and a list of appointment times to a brochure urging students to get tetanus shots was enough to increase the percentage of students that followed their call to action by 25%.
According to Gladwell’s research, it seems that the secret to the success of the case studies he examines is research and close monitoring of the results of their efforts to be ‘sticky’. One great example in the book is Sesame Street. The success of Sesame Street and its groundbreaking format was not achieved by accident. The producers thoroughly test their episodes on children to make sure that the content holds their attention. The lesson to learn here is that focus groups and consultation of opinion leaders within your target demographic are powerful ways to learn how to influence those key members of society that influence the masses. According to Gladwell, there is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.
Be on the lookout later this week for my final Tipping Point-related post on “the Power of Context”. In the meantime, you may be interested to read this week's Time Magazine Q&A with Malcolm Gladwell. You can also follow the author himself on Twitter!
Malcolm Gladwell (shown above in this Harry Rosen ad, oddly enough) is a British-born Canadian journalist, author, and pop sociologist. He writes for The New Yorker and has authored three books that really get you thinking: The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), and Outliers (2008). I recently read Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point, and would like to share some highlights with the lovely readers of The Daily Breakthrough.
The Tipping Point is a fascinating book about epidemics. Not epidemics like H1N1, but rather social epidemics such as Paul Revere’s ride, Hush Puppies, Blue’s Clues, and suicide in Micronesia. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell examines how and why some ideas, products, messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do. This question is extremely relevant to people in marketing, because we obviously would want to know what we can do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own. In the book, Gladwell argues that there are three important agents of change, which play key roles in social epidemics: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. This blog post will focus on the Law of the Few. I will post again later in the week to write about the Stickiness Factor and the Power of Context, so stay tuned.
The Law of the Few refers to the idea that social epidemics are driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people (sociable, energetic, knowledgeable, influential). Gladwell identifies three kinds of people that can be the messengers responsible for ‘tipping’ the word-of-mouth epidemics that dictate our tastes, trends, and fashions: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.
Connectors are very sociable people, who bring the world together. (Think: Kevin Bacon.) They have a knack of making friends and acquaintances. They manage to occupy many different worlds, subcultures and niches. A key tidbit of information relating to Connectors is that when it comes to finding out about new jobs, new information, new ideas, “weak ties” or acquaintances are always more important than strong ties or close friends and family members. This is because acquaintances by definition occupy different worlds than you do. This means that they are much more likely to know something that you don’t. Acquaintances represent social power. I would argue that social media are a good example of this argument, although your relationships with the majority of your connections/friends/people you follow on Twitter might not even be strong enough to call them acquaintances. No matter, these weak ties provide you with access to information that you would not otherwise acquire, which I would say is part of the appeal of this technology.
Mavens are socially motivated experts, sharing and trading information that they have collected. They read more magazines than the rest of us, more newspapers, and they may be the only people who read junk mail. In social epidemics, Mavens are data banks that provide the message.
Finally, there are the Salesmen. These people are persuasive by nature and have innate abilities including body language and verbal expression skills that make them highly influential on the rest of us.
The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional individuals out there, capable of starting epidemics by influencing the masses. So if you want to make an impact, entrust your message or product to a Connector, Maven, or Salesman, or better yet, all of the above, and hope they can work their magic and get the word out!
The internet is all a-twitter over Google Wave. In the development team's words, it's "an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless". In other terms, it's an online conversation (like an instant message or email) that can be edited and added to by anyone invited to do just that. It incorporates photos, wikis, and elements of social media, all with the intention of changing the way we communicate online.
Derek: Best to hop on this Wave now