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Malcolm Gladwell. Photo courtesy of Little Brown & Co.

From 1987 to 1996, Malcolm Gladwell worked for the Washington Post, first as a science writer and then as New York City Bureau Chief. Since 1997, he has been a staff writer for the New Yorker. In 2000, Gladwell’s first book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little Brown & Co.) was published and caused quite a stir.

The Tipping Point examines complex social and market phenomena through a methodical framework with engaging, easy-to-understand language. The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea. It brings light to the best way of understanding the emergence of a variety of phenomena—such fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, the rise of teenage smoking, the phenomenon of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life—to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products, and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

Patrick Kwan interviews Malcolm Gladwell about The Tipping Point and finds out how activists can apply the theory to their own work.

Can you give our readers a brief overview of what The Tipping Point is about?
The book talks about principles—things one ought to pay attention to. Actually, the whole first section discusses the importance of people who’ve got what I like to call social power. The book emphasizes the crucial aspects of targeting the people who play very specialized and critical roles in communities. Realistically, you need to reach only a few of those ‘social power’ people to make a big difference.

It is also devoted to explaining the phenomenon of word of mouth, which is something created by these three very rare and special psychological types (with “social power”), whom I call Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. I profile three people who I think embody those types, and then I use the example of Paul Revere and his midnight ride to point out the subtle characteristics of this kind of social epidemic. A little bit of sociology, a little of psychology and a little bit of history, all aid in explaining a very common but mysterious phenomenon that we deal with every day. But there are other methods where people ought to be far more experimental, and stop thinking they can predict with perfect accuracy before something starts, where it’s going to end up. To get your message across, we must be willing to try all kinds of different strategies and be open to the possibility that something that we thought wasn’t going to be that big a deal really could be the opening we have been waiting for.

Where did you get the idea for the book?
Before I went to work for the New Yorker, I was a reporter for the Washington Post and I covered the AIDS epidemic. As I learned more and more about HIV, one of the things that struck me was how strange epidemics were. If you talk to the people who study epidemics—epidemiologists—you realize that they have a strikingly different way of looking at the world. They don’t share the assumptions the rest of us have about how and why change happens. The term “Tipping Point,” for example, comes from the world of epidemiology. It’s the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s the boiling point. It’s the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards. AIDS tipped in 1982, when it went from a rare disease affecting a few gay men to a worldwide epidemic. Crime in New York City tipped in the mid-1990s, when the murder rate suddenly plummeted.

When I heard that phrase for the first time I remember thinking, Wow. What if everything has a tipping point? Wouldn’t it be cool to try and look for tipping points in business, or in social policy, or in advertising or in any number of other non-medical areas?

What do you think is the most significant aspect of the tipping point?
One of the main things is to go back to the connectors and mavens—the key factor isn’t how many people we reach. We tend to get obsessed with the sheer volume of people who are at the seat of our message. But that is not the issue.

We need to start focusing on the people themselves. What type of people am I reaching? Who can be an evangelist for my message? Who among my potential audience has the social skills to spread the word themselves? Who can play a socialite role in this particular epidemic? We must learn that the people who play these rolls are a huge part of bringing the message to the tipping point. That is the most important aspect.

How does one identify the mavens and connectors in a community—perhaps, by targeting celebrities?
No, I’m sort of reacting against the celebrity targeting. My idea is that there are people who play subtler, yet equally important roles within target peer groups.

For example, it’s easy to see [if] celebrities influence my behavior, the clothes I wear, or the way I have my hair. But there are far more important indirect things that we do which don’t come from celebrities. They come from people in our peer group who aren’t necessarily well recognized but who play extremely important roles in determining the opinions and choices we make. They are the people who occupy the special positions in our lives; friends, teachers, siblings. I have a brother who knows a lot about computers. And I have been incredibly influenced in purchasing my laptops and desktops, not by advertising, but by what that brother of mine says and thinks. I take his opinion very, very seriously.

The fact is I am never going to listen to a celebrity on what computer they like. I’ll listen to someone who I know is giving me good, honest advice, someone I take very seriously. I think that all of us have people like this in our lives. We are simply not aware of how much we rely on them. This is a point I was trying to make in the book. Make people more aware of their true influences.

What do you think is the main obstacle in utilizing the tipping point approach?
The biggest obstacle in the way of change is simply that people aren’t aware of all the options that are available to them. I mean change is just not possible without awareness. Especially not grassroots change. And you can’t spread awareness unless you have started some kind of genuine conversation among real people.

There are a lot of activists who after reading The Tipping Point come away thinking that everything they do, every little thing, makes a difference. I’ve always wondered if that’s exactly the message you’re sending—every little thing makes a difference?
No. While a little thing can make a big difference, it’s not exactly every little thing. My basic point is: the line between success and failure is very often extremely narrow, and something that looks like it’s going nowhere can, at times, be just the smallest push away from success. There are specific kinds of target points that have the ability to fundamentally change the way we think about something. So [for example], the difference between the phenomenal epidemic of the Atkins diet compared with diets that came before it, which never really went anywhere, is incredibly small. Atkins is really a very unsophisticated diet; all it does is reframe the issue, from being about calories and fats to being about carbohydrates—it’s just a different way of stating what a diet does. But that made all the difference in the world. This is just a simple way to show how narrow the line is between success and failure.

Do you feel that the methods discussed in your book are better suited for products or ideas?
I am not sure that there is a huge difference between the two things. I mean by and large, many of the same principles apply. With both ideas and products the goal of the marketer is to start a conversation and the techniques of starting a conversation are the same. Firstly, you have to get the information out to people who know how to start a conversation. Secondly, it has to be a subject of which people can talk about. Product or idea, the subject has to have some sort of depth to it. With ideas it is a little easier to see how it works because there is more “meat” to them. There is already something to talk about, to discuss.

I also don’t think there is a difference at the end of the process. One of the main issues about spreading ideas is that we need to focus on facts. We need conversation points. We need a way in that will have an impact.

You can ask me to talk about shoes [and] I could very easily do that. But if you ask me to talk about animal rights, and I am not familiar with that world, I need to have something to start the conversations with. A lot of people don’t have that and it can be a real barrier.

Can you give an example of an activist organization that has used the techniques you describe?
Well, the gay community on the gay marriage issues. What gay activists are interested in is, how do you frame an issue for the maximum amount of support and awareness? When we talk about gay marriage how should we discuss it? Well, I certainly have all sorts of strong feelings about that. In fact, there are ways to talk about it that I think can make it a real winning issue. And of course there are ways to talk about it that end the conversation before it begins.

This is a good example of an issue because it is an area people are paying lots of attention to. My advice is to maintain that gay marriage is not about gays, it is about the larger issue of freedom. Don’t we live in a society in which we allow people to do things even if we may not agree with them? The second issue is to acknowledge that this issue is difficult for some people. It is important to recognize that fact, that gay marriage is something that people may find uncomfortable. But once again, that is not the issue. Don’t we live in a society that requires you tolerate certain things, even if they make you feel uncomfortable? You don’t look down on people who have a problem with it—you acknowledge the problem. And say I am not trying to convert you, I am just trying to win your tolerance.

Can you use the same process when dealing with a product?
Yes, a real beautiful example of it is the way Apple markets the iPod. If you look at their marketing, advertising, and the way they talk about it, they always use incredibly simple terms. The ads are just a silhouette and the iPod itself is designed in such a simple way. The only real choice a consumer has to make is what color to get it in. This is an example of very deliberate framing. Depicting something that has been perceived as an incredibly complicated new technology and framing it as uncomplicated, easy—just a fashion accessory, to regard in the same way you regard belts, shoes or scarves. Apple is literally promising that something you always thought was daunting, is not going to be daunting at all. And that to me is the genius of the way the iPod has taken off the way it has. It took notice of the big fear we had to the adoption of the mp3 and similar kinds of devices. There was an overall sense that we wouldn’t be able to master them.

What do you hope readers will take away from The Tipping Point?
One of the things I’d like to do is show people how to start “positive” epidemics of their own. The virtue of an epidemic, after all, is that just a little input is enough to get it started, and it can spread very, very quickly. That makes it something of obvious and enormous interest to everyone, from educators trying to reach students to businesses trying to spread the word about their product, or for that matter to anyone who’s trying to create a change with limited resources. The book has a number of case studies of people who have successfully started epidemics—an advertising agency, for example, and a breast cancer activist. I think they are really fascinating. I also take a pressing social issue, teenage smoking, and break it down and analyze what an epidemic approach to solving that problem would look like. The point is that by the end of the book I think the reader will have a clear idea of what starting an epidemic actually takes. This is not an abstract, academic book. It’s very practical. And it’s very hopeful. It’s brain software.

Patrick Kwan is a New York-based activist and founder of the Student Animal Rights Alliance (www.defendanimals.org), an organization dedicated to building a strong and diverse youth movement for animal protection. Watch for Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking in early 2005.

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