A well written and very interesting book. This is a study of all factors that contribute to an epidemic. What is an epidemic? Anything that starts small and unnoticed and suddenly spreads to a great number of people. This book looks at actual health epidemics and also at fashion epidemics or crime epidemics, at what it takes to 'spread' something - an idea, a concept, a book - from a local event to a mass movement.
What it takes to 'spread' apparently is the involvement of some special people. These are people focally positioned, highly connected, informed and persuasive. Gladwell has names for them such as the connectors, mavens and salesmen. The interesting part about the book are the many neat concepts that can be adapted to salesmanship and marketing for any business. A few that struck me the most are described below:
1. Broken Windows Effect. Gladwell tells a very interesting story about the sharp decline of crime in New York following the clean up campaign in the 1990's. Police began to crack down, not on serious crime, but on petty crime such as fare dodging in the subways. The city also launched a campaign to rid the subway trains of graffiti. Although the city focused on petty crime, serious crime also began to steadily decline. Apparently the message the public received was 'the city now pays attention and crime no longer goes unpunished.' All crime dropped. This is the Broken Windows Theory. Broken windows send a message that a neighborhood is neglected and draw vagrants and undesirables, contributing to the further decline of a neighborhood. In summary, small or seemingly irrelevant elements in our surroundings can be communicating a more powerful message effecting the behavior of the public.
2. Context matters. In a different study Gladwell described, it was shown that people are not necessarily altruistic vs. uncaring by nature. The simple fact that someone thought he was running late for a meeting was enough to cause otherwise caring people to bypass a stranger in need of help without offering a hand. This is critical in shifting how we currently perceive behavior and regard personalities. The implication from Gladwell's book is that we are not consistently this or that but in fact are strongly influenced by context. Are we late, are we tired, are we relaxing with friends or reporting to a boss? These factors all influence the personality attributes we might display in a particular situation. This extends even to such values as honesty, faithfulness, cruelty, etc...
3. Stickiness. For an epidemic to spread there has to be a 'stickiness' to the message. This is the hardest thing to create or predict. Stickiness is a special something about the message or a thing that makes it resonate with people who come in context with it. The Ya Ya Sisterhood was a book that proved to be very sticky because it was a book about female bonding that inspired readers to recreate their own female circles. It was read and discussed by groups and came to symbolize something greater that just the book itself. It seems to me from the other examples that Gladwell also gave that stickiness comes from interaction. When people are able to interact and then relate to a message that makes it sticky.
The book is full of other gems that, if followed with further deductive thinking, can really shift how we understand influence and marketing. A highly recommended read.
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