The Tipping Point: Introduction–Chapter 2

I’m going to introduce three fascinating kinds of people I call Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen, who play a critical role in the word-of-mouth epidemics that dictate our tastes and trends and fashions.

In his history of the cigarette industry, Richard Kluger writes that the marketers at R. J. Reynolds, which sells Winston, were “delighted with the attention” and “made the offending slogan the lyric of a bouncy little jingle on television and radio, and wryly defended their syntax as a colloquialism rather than bad grammar.”

Ironically, had she been attacked on a lonely street with just one witness, she might have lived.

There are plenty of advertising executives who think that precisely because of the sheer ubiquity of marketing efforts these days, word-of-mouth appeals have become the only kind of persuasion that most of us respond to anymore.

Do we all belong to separate worlds, operating simultaneously but autonomously, so that the links between any two people, anywhere in the world, are few and distant?

But in the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.

From there, she went to work for a public interest law firm called BPI, and while at BPI she became obsessed with the fact that Chicago’s parks were crumbling and neglected, so she gathered together a motley collection of nature lovers, historians, civic activists, and housewives and founded a lobbying group called Friends of the Parks.

If you go through that history and keep count, the number of worlds that Lois has belonged to comes to eight: the actors, the writers, the doctors, the lawyers, the park-lovers, the politicians, the railroad buffs, and the flea market aficionados.

To capture this apparent paradox, Granovetter coined a marvelous phrase: the strength of weak ties.

When he saw people on the roads, he was so naturally and irrepressibly social he would have stopped and told them.

The whole premise behind sales, or supermarket specials, is that we, as consumers, are very aware of the prices of things and will react accordingly: we buy more in response to lower prices and less in response to higher prices.

The subjects were also shown control segments of the three newscasters, as they talked about unequivocally happy or sad subjects (the funeral of Indira Gandhi; a breakthrough in treating a congenital disease).

It’s much more subtle and for that reason much more insidious, and that much harder to insulate ourselves against.

Some books on salesmanship recommend that persuaders try to mirror the posture or talking styles of their clients in order to establish rapport.

Only the charismatic person could infect the other people in the room with his or her emotions.