The Tipping Point - Noise and Substance

FastCompany’s Clive Thompson describes Duncan Watts’ compelling debunk Is The Tipping Point Toast of Malcolm Gladwell’s marketing classic The Tipping Point

- the book that created much of the buzz around ‘microniches’ and viral marketing. Gladwell’s basic point is that if you have something the market is ready for, a tiny number of ‘influentials’ (Mavens, who are experts on everything, and Salesmen, who are natural networkers) is all you need to ‘tip’ the product from obscurity into ubiquity. Watts, on the basis of a great deal of research on how ideas spread in communities, pretty much invalidates the idea that one group of people is especially important. I think Watts is right, for two reasons.

1. I don’t believe - and haven’t found - that most people follow individuals that much of the time. Mainstream acceptance means convincing a critical number of people who can think for themselves - it goes mass market once a critical number of everyone is reached so people are convinced that ‘all those people can’t be wrong’.

2. ‘Tipping points’ in almost all complex, self-organizing systems exhibit a power law like 1/f noise. The idea may be new to you, but it’s pretty straightforward. The 1/f noise power law comes from engineering, but can be applied to all kinds of events. Examples include the size and frequency of earthquakes or the probability of stock market crashes. The phenomenon is well described by John and Mary Gribben in ‘Deep Simplicity‘, and at time of writing the wikipedia entry is comprehensive. What the law means is that small phenomena or events are much more frequent than big ones, but exactly when either type happen is fairly random. For both frequent events like London buses, or infrequent ones such as meteor showers, you could wait ages for one, then lots arrive one after the other.

Both economists and earthquake scientists have tried hard to find magic formulae to predict small events from underlying factors, and big events from small ones. But the idea of noise means there is no pattern, and you can’t judge how big an event will by what triggers it.

As a result, trying to create seismic shifts is in general a waste of time. Successful marketing is nearly always about riding waves rather than creating them - and that’s as much the case for Google and Apple as for the rest of us. The other message is that trying to find a magic formula is more about marketing mystique than reality. In real life PR and marketing - to paraphrase Sam Goldwyn - ‘The harder you work, the luckier you get’- success comes when the market is ready, and when real targeted effort goes in to communicating with, and satisfying the needs of, ‘ordinary’ customers - not trying to find the extraordinary ones!