THE TIPPING POINT How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference docx

TH E TIPPING POINTHow Little Things Can Make a GLADWELL LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY BOSTO N • NEW YORK • LONDON Copyright © 2000 by Malcolm Gladwell All rights reserved.. At a fashionsh

TH E TIPPING POINT

How Little Things Can Make a

GLADWELL

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY

BOSTO N • NEW YORK • LONDON

Copyright © 2000 by Malcolm Gladwell

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

First Edition

The author is grateful for permission to include the

following previously copyrighted material: Excerpts from interviews on Market Mavens videotape by Linda Price, Lawrence F Feick, and Audrey Guskey Reprinted by permission of the authors

Exerpts from Daniel Wegner, "Transactive Memory:

A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind." Journal

of Personality and Social Psychology (1991), vol 61,

no 6 Reprinted by permission of the author.

Exerpts from Donald H Rubinstein, "Love and Suffering: Adolescent Social ization and Suicide in

Micronesia," Contemporary Pacific (Spring 1995), vol.

7, no l, and "Epidemic Suicide Among Micronesian

Adolescents." Social Science and Medicine (1983).

vol 17 Reprinted by permission of the author.

Excerpts from Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett

HM1033.G53 2000 302 dc21 99-047576 1 0 98765432 1 Design: Meryl Sussman Levavi/Digitext, Inc

Printed in the United States of America

To my parents,

Joyce and Graham Gladwell

Introduction 3

ONE

The Three Rules of Epidemics 15

T W O The Law of the Few:Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen 30

T H R E E The Stickiness Factor:

Sesame Street, Blue's Clues, and the

Educational Virus 89

VIII TH F TIPPING POINT

F OUR The Power of Context (Part

One): Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall

of New York City Crime 133

F I V E The Power of Context (Part

Two): The Magic Number One Hundredand Fifty 169

S I X Case Study: Rumors, Sneakers,

and the Power of Translation 193

TH E TIPPIN G POINT

Introduction

or Hush Puppies — the classicAmerican brushed-suede shoes with thelightweight crepe sole —- the TippingPoint came somewhere between late 1994and early 1995 The brand had been allbut dead until that point Sales were down

to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly tobackwoods outlets and small-town familystores Wolverine, the company that makesHush Puppies, was thinking of phasing outthe shoes that made them famous But thensomething strange happened At a fashionshoot, two Hush Puppies executives —Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis — raninto a stylist from New York who toldthem that the classic Hush Puppies had

suddenly become hip in the clubs and bars

of downtown Manhattan "We were beingtold," Baxter recalls, "that there wereresale shops in the Village, in Soho,where the shoes were being sold Peoplewere going to the Ma and Pa stores, thelittle stores that still carried them, andbuying them up." Baxter and Lewis werebaffled at first It made no sense to themthat shoes that were so obviously out offashion could make a comeback "Wewere told that Isaac Mizrahi was wearingthe shoes himself," Lewis says "I think it'sfair to say thai at the time we had no ideawho Isaac Mizrahi was."

By the fall of 1995, things began tohappen in a rush first the designer JohnBartlctt called He wanted to use I lushPuppies in his spring collection Then

another Man hattan designer, Anna Sui,

called, wanting shoes for her show as

well In Los Angeles, the designer JoelFitzgerald put a twenty-five-foot inflatablebasset hound — the symbol of the HushPuppies brand — on the roof of hisHollywood store and gutted an adjoiningart gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppiesboutique While he was still painting andputting up shelves, the actor Pee-weeHerman walked in and asked for a couple

of pairs "It was total word of mouth,"Fitzgerald remembers

In 1995, the company sold 450,000pairs of the classic Hush Puppies, and thenext year it sold lour times that, and theyear after that still more, until HushPuppies were once again a staple of thewardrobe of the young American male In

1996, Hush Puppies won the prize for bestaccessory at the Council of FashionDesigners awards dinner at LincolnCenter, and the president of the firm stood

up On the stage with Calvin Klein andDonna Karan and accepted an award for

an achievement that — as he would be thefirst to admit — his company had almostnothing to do with Hush Puppies hadsuddenly exploded, and it all started with

a handful of kids in the East Village andSoho

How did that happen? Those first fewkids, whoever they were, weren'tdeliberately trying to promote HushPuppies They were wearing themprecisely because no one else would wearthem Then the fad spread to two fashiondesigners who used the shoes to peddle

something else — haute couture Theshoes were an incidental touch No onewas trying to make Hush Puppies a trend.Yet, somehow, that's exactly whathappened The shoes passed a certainpoint in popularity and they tipped Howdocs a thirty-dollar pair of shoes go from

a handful of downtown Manhattan hipstersand designers to every mall in America inthe space of two years?

1.

There was a time, not very long ago,

in the desperately poor New York Cityneighborhoods of Brownsville and EastNew York, when the streets would turninto ghost towns at dusk Ordinary

working people wouldn't walk on the

sidewalks Children wouldn't ride theirbicycles on the streets Old folks wouldn'tsit on stoops and park benches The drugtrade ran so rampant and gang warfarewas so ubiquitous in that part of Brooklynthat most people would take to the safety

of their apartment at nightfall Policeofficers who served in Brownsville in the1980s and early 1990s say that, in thoseyears, as soon as the sun went down theirradios exploded with chatter between beatofficers and their dispatchers over everyconceivable kind of violent and dangerouscrime In 1992, there were 2,154 murders

in New York City and 626,182 seriouscrimes, with the weight of those crimesfalling hardest in places like Brownsvilleand Hast New York But then something

strange happened At some mysterious andcritical point the crime rate began to turn.

It tipped Within five' years, murders haddropped 64.3 percent to 770 and totalcrimes had fallen by almost half to355,893 In Brownsville and East NewYork, the sidewalks filled up again, thebicycles came back, and old folksreappeared on the stoops "There was atime when it wasn't uncommon to hearrapid tire, like you would hear somewhere

in the jungle in Vietnam," says InspectorEdward Messadri, who commands thepolice precinct in Brownsville "I don'thear the gunfire anymore."

The New York City police will tellyou that what happened in New York wasthat the city's policing strategiesdramatically improved Criminologists

point to the decline of the crack trade andthe aging of the population Economists,meanwhile, say that the gradualimprovement in the city's economy overthe course of the 1990s had the effect ofemploying those who might otherwisehave become criminals These are theconventional expla nations for the rise andfall of social problems, but in the endnone is any more satisfying than thestatement that kids in the East Villagecaused the Hush Puppies revival Thechanges in the drug trade, the population,and the economy are all long-term trends,happening all Over the country They don'texplain why crime plunged in New YorkCity so much more than in other citiesaround the country, and they don't explainwhy it all happened in such an

extraordinarily short time As for theimprovements made by the police, theyare important too But there is a puzzlinggap between the scale of the changes inpolicing and the size of the effect onplaces like Brownsville and East NewYork After all, crime didn't just slowlyebb in New York as conditions graduallyimproved It plummeted How can achange in a handful of economic andsocial indices cause murder rates to fall

by two-thirds in five years?

2

The Tipping Point is the biography of

an idea, and the idea is very simple It isthat the best way to understand theemergence of fashion trends, the ebb andHow of crime waves, or, for that matter,the transformation ot unknown books into

bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking,

or the phenomena of word of mouth, orany number of the other mysteriouschanges that mark everyday life is to think

of them as epidemics Ideas and productsand messages and behaviors spread justlike viruses do

The rise of Hush Puppies and the fall

of New York's crime rate are textbookexamples of epidemics in action Althoughthey may sound as if they don't have verymuch in common, they share a basic,underlying pattern First of all, they areclear examples of contagious behavior

No one took out an advertisement and toldpeople that the traditional Hush Puppieswere cool and they should start wear ingthem Those kids simply wore the shoeswhen they went to clubs or cafes or

walked the streets of downtown NewYork, and in so doing exposed otherpeople to their fashion sense Theyinfected them with the Hush Puppies

"virus."

The crime decline in New York surelyhappened the same way It wasn't thatsome huge percentage ol wouldbemurderers suddenly sat up in 1993 anddecided not to commit any more crimes.Nor was it that the police managedmagically to intervene in a hugepercentage of situations that wouldotherwise have turned deadly Whathappened is that the small number ofpeople in the small number of situations inwhich the police or the new social forceshad some impact started behaving verydifferently, and thai behavior somehow

spread to other would-be criminals insimilar situations Somehow a largenumber ol people in New York got

"infected" with an anti-crime virus in ashort, time

The second distinguishingcharacteristic of these two examples isthat in both cases little changes had bigclfccts All of the possible reasons forwhy New York's crime rate dropped arechanges that happened at the margin; theywere incremental changes The cracktrade leveled off The population got alittle older The police force got a littlebetter Yet the effect was dramatic So toowith Hush Puppies How many kids are

we talking about who began wearing theshoes in downtown Manhattan? Twenty?Fifty? One hundred — at the most? Yet

their actions seem to have single-handedlystarted an international fashion trend.

Finally, both changes happened in ahurry They didn't build steadily andslowly It is instructive to look at a chart

of the crime rate in New York City from,say, the mid1960s to the late 1990s Itlooks like a giant arch In 1965, therewere 200,000 crimes in the city and Iromthat point on the number begins a sharprise, doubling in two years and continuingalmost unbroken until it hits 650,000crimes a year in the mid-1970s It stayssteady at that level for the next twodecades, before plunging downward in

1992 as sharply as it rose thirty yearsearlier Crime did not taper off It didn'tgently decelerate It hit a certain point andjammed on the brakes

These three characteristics — one,contagiousness; two, the fact that littlecauses can have big effects; and three, thatchange happens not gradually but at onedramatic moment — are the same threeprinciples that define how measles movesthrough a grade-school classroom or theflu attacks every winter Of the three, thethird trait — the idea that epidemics canrise or fall in one dramatic moment — isthe most important, because it is theprinciple that makes sense of the first twoand that permits the greatest insight intowhy modern change happens the way itdoes The name given to that one dramaticmoment in an epidemic when everythingcan change all at once is the TippingPoint.

3

A world that follows the rules ofepidemics is a very dif ferent place fromthe world we think we live in now Think,for a moment, about the concept ofcontagiousness If I say that word to you,you think of colds and the flu or perhapssomething very dangerous like HIV orEbola We have, in our minds, a veryspecific, biological notion of whatcontagiousness means But if there can beepidemics of crime or epidemics offashion, there must be all kinds of thingsjust as contagious as viruses Have youever thought about yawning, for instance?Yawning is a surprisingly powerful act.Just because you read the word "yawning"

in the previous two sentences — and thetwo additional "yawns" in this sentence —

a good number of you will probably yawn

within the next few minutes Even as I'mwriting this, I've yawned twice If you'rereading this in a public place, and you'vejust yawned, chances are that a goodproportion of everyone who saw youyawn is now yawning too, and a goodproportion of the people watching thepeople who watched you yawn are nowyawning as well, and on and on, in anever-widening, yawning circle.

Yawning is incredibly contagious Imade some of you reading this yawnsimply by writing the word "yawn." Thepeople who yawned when they saw youyawn, meanwhile, were infected by thesight of you yawning — which is a secondkind of contagion They might even haveyawned if they only heard you yawn,because yawning is also aurally

contagious: if you play an audiotape of ayawn to blind people, they'll yawn too.And finally, if you yawned as you readthis, did the thought cross your mind —however unconsciously and fleetingly —that you might be tired? I suspect that forsome of you it did, which means thatyawns can also be emotionally contagious.Simply by writing the word, I can plant afeeling in your mind Can the flu virus dothat? Contagiousness, in other words, is anunexpected property of all kinds of things,and we have to remember that, if we are

to recognize and diagnose epidemicchange

The second of the principles ofepidemics — that little changes cansomehow have big effects — is also afairly radical notion We are, as humans,

heavily socialized to make a kind of roughapproximation between cause and effect.

If we want to communicate a strongemotion, if we want to convince someonethat, say, we love them, we realize that weneed to speak passionately andforthrightly If we want to break bad news

to someone, we lower our voices andchoose our words carefully We aretrained to think that what goes into anytransaction or relationship or system must

be directly related, in intensity anddimension, to what comes out Consider,for example, the following puzzle I giveyou a large piece of paper, and I ask you

to fold it over once, and then take thatfolded paper and fold it over again, andthen again, and again, until you haverefolded the original paper 50 times How

tall do you think the final stack is going tobe? In answer to that question, mostpeople will fold the sheet in their mind'seye, and guess that the pile would be asthick as a phone book or, if they're reallycourageous, they'll say that it would be astall as a refrigerator But the real answer

is that the height of the stack wouldapproximate the distance to the sun And ifyou folded it over one more time, the stackwould be as high as the distance to the sunand back This is an example of what inmathematics is called a geometricprogression Epidemics are anotherexample of geometric progression: when avirus spreads through a population, itdoubles and doubles again, until it has(figuratively) grown from a single sheet ofpaper all the way to the sun m fifty steps

As human beings we have a hard timewith this kind of progression, because theend result — the effect — seems far out ofproportion to the cause To appreciate thepower of epidemics, we have to abandonthis expectation about proportionality Weneed to prepare ourselves for thepossibility that sometimes big changesfollow from small events, and thatsometimes these changes can happen veryquickly.

t ' THE TIPPING POINT

This possibility of sudden change is atthe center of the idea of the Tipping Pointand might well be the hardest of all toaccept The expression first came intopopular use in the 1970s to describe theflight to the suburbs of whites living in theolder cities of the American Northeast

When the number of incoming AfricanAmericans in a particular neighborhoodreached a certain point—20 percent, say

— sociologists observed that thecommunity would "tip": most of theremaining whites would leave almostimmediately The Tipping Point is themoment of critical mass, the threshold, theboiling point There was a Tipping Pointfor violent crime in New York in the early1990s, and a Tipping Point for thereemergence of Hush Puppies, just asthere is a Tipping Point for theintroduction of any new technology Sharpintroduced the first lowpriced fax machine

in 1984, and sold about 80,000 of thosemachines in the United States in that firstyear For the next three years, businessesslowly and steadily bought more and more

faxes, until, in 1987, enough people hadfaxes that it made sense for everyone toget a fax Nineteen eighty-seven was thefax machine Tipping Point A millionmachines were sold that year, and by 1989two million new machines had gone intooperation Cellular phones have followedthe same trajectory Through the 1990s,they got smaller and cheaper, and servicegot better until 1998, when the technologyhit a Tipping Point and suddenly everyonehad a cell phone (For an explanation ofthe mathematics of Tipping Points, see theEndnotes-) All epidemics have TippingPoints Jonathan Crane, a sociologist atthe University of Illinois, has looked at theeffect the number of role models in acommunity — the professionals,managers, teachers whom the Census

Bureau has defined as "high status" — has

on the lives of teenagers in the sameneighborhood He found little difference

in pregnancy rates or school drop-outrates in neighborhoods of between 40 and

5 percent of highstatus workers But whenthe number of professionals droppedbelow 5 percent, the problems exploded.For black schoolchildren, for example, asthe percentage of high-status workers fallsjust 2.2 percentage points — from 5.6percent to 3.4 percent — drop-out ratesmore than double At the same lippingPoint, the rales of childbearing forteenaged girls — which barely move at all

up to that point — nearly double Weassume, intuitively, that neighborhoodsand social problems decline in some kind

of steady progression But sometimes they

may not decline steadily at all; at theTipping Point, schools can lose control oftheir students, and family life candisintegrate all at once.

1 remember once as a child seeing ourfamily's puppy encounter snow (or thefirst time He was shocked and delightedand overwhelmed, wagging his tailnervously, sniffing about in this strange,fluffy substance, whimpering with themystery of it all It wasn't much colder onthe morning of his first snowfall than ithad been the evening before It might havebeen 34 degrees the previous evening, andnow it was 31 degrees Almost nothinghad changed, in other words, yet — andthis was the amazing thing — everythinghad changed Rain had become somethingentirely different Snow! We are all, at

heart, gradualists, our expectations set bvthe steady passage of time But the world

of the Tipping Point is a place where the

M THE TIPPING POINT

unexpected becomes expected, whereradical change is more than possibility It

is — contrary to all our expectations — acertainty

In pursuit of this radical idea, I'mgoing to take you to Baltimore, to learnfrom the epidemic of syphilis in that city.I'm going to introduce three fascinatingkinds of people I call Mavens,Connectors, and Salesmen, who play acritical role in the word-of-mouthepidemics that dictate our tastes andtrends and fashions I'll take you to the set

of the children's shows Sesame Street and

Blue's Clues and into the fascinating

world of the man who helped to create theColumbia Record Club to look at howmessages can be structured to have themaximum possible impact on all theiraudience I'll take you to a high-techcompany in Delaware to talk about theTipping Points that govern group life and

to the subways of New York City tounderstand how the crime epidemic wasbrought to an end there The point of all ofthis is to answer two simple questions thatlie at the heart of what we would ail like

to accomplish as educators, parents,marketers, business people, andpolicymakers Why is it that some ideas orbehaviors or products start epidemics andothers don't? And what can we do todeliberately start and control positiveepidemics of our own?

ONE

The Three Rules of Epidemics

What caused Baltimore's syphilisproblem to tip? According to the Centersfor Disease Control, the problem wascrack cocaine Crack is known to cause adramatic increase in the kind of riskysexual behavior that leads to the spread ofthings like HIV and syphilis It brings far

more people into poor areas to buy drugs,which then increases the likelihood thatthey will take an infection home with them

to their own neighborhood It changes thepatterns of social connections betweenneighborhoods Crack, the CDC said, wasthe little push that the syphilis problemneeded to turn into a raging epidemic

i6 THE TIPPING POINT

John Zenilman of Johns HopkinsUniversity in Balti more, an expert onsexually transmitted diseases, has anotherexplanation: the breakdown of medicalservices in the city's poorestneighborhoods "In 1990-91, we hadthirty-six thousand patient visits at thecity's sexually transmitted diseaseclinics," Zenilman says "Then the citydecided to gradually cm back because of

budgetary problems The number ofclinicians [medical personnel] went fromseventeen to ten The number ofphysicians went from three to essentiallynobody Patient visits dropped to twenty-one thousand There also was a similardrop in the amount of held outreach staff.There was a lot of politics — things thatused to happen, like computer upgrades,didn't happen It was a worst-casescenario of city bureaucracy notfunctioning They would run out of drugs."When there were 36,000 patient visits

a year in the STD clinics of Baltimore'sinner city, in other words, the disease waskept in equilibrium At some pointbetween 36,000 and 21,000 patient visits

a year, according to Zenilman, the diseaseerupted It began spilling out of the inner

city, up the streets and highways thatconnect those neighborhoods to the rest ofthe city Suddenly, people who might havebeen infectious for a week before gettingtreated were now going around infectingothers for two or three or four weeksbefore they got cured The breakdown intreatment made syphilis a much biggerissue than it had been before.

There is a third theory, which belongs

to John Pot terat, one of the country'sleading epidemiologists His culprits arethe physical changes in those yearsaffecting

THE THREE RULES OF EPIDEMICS '7

East and West Baltimore, the heavilydepressed neighbor hoods on either side

of Baltimore's downtown, where thesyphilis problem was centered In the

mid-1990s, he points out, the city ofBaltimore embarked on a highlypublicized policy of dynamiting the old1960s-style public housing high-rises inEast and West Baltimore Two of the mostpublicized demolitions — LexingtonTerrace in West Baltimore and Lafavette

Courts in East Baltimore — were huge

projects, housing hundreds of families,that served as centers for crime andinfectious disease At the same time,people began to move out of the old rowhouses in East and West Baltimore, asthose began to deteriorate as well

"It was absolutely striking," Potteratsays, of the first time he toured East andWest Baltimore "Fifty percent ol the rowhouses were boarded up, and there wasalso a process where they destroyed the