The Tipping Point | Malcom Gladwell

Tipping Point is the point when the cirtical mass is reached and a product, illness or tv program is spreading rapidly and becomes mainstream.

He looks on why some products or behaviours start this "epidemics" and how we might be able control them.

There are three rules of epidemics: The law of the few (you need a maven, salesmen or connector - they are translators, they take ideas from a highly speialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand), stickiness factor (your message need to be easy to remember), power of context (the environment is important).

Stickiness: Why was Sesame Place so successfull? The people who run the show did a lot of study and research to find out what message kids remember and how to get it sticky. The for example found out that children love animals. If there would have been an episode without an animal the kids tend to remember only 12% of the show instead of 75%.

Same with phone numbers. Why are our phones numbers 7 digits not 8 or 9? Bell wanted to have a big pool of numbers but they also should be sticky. Research found that we are best remembering 6-7 categories, numbers etc. Then they are sticky enough.

Power of context: In New York City the crime rate in the 80s were incredibly high. They tackeld that with cleaning up the small crimes, eg. jailing people who peed on the street, grafitii in the subways, fixing broken windows. All this small stuff like grafiti, not paying the fare for the subway was the tipping point for all other crime. Once that had been fixed the crime rate dropped about 50%.

tj