Jan
28
Marketing, Tipping Points, and Memetics
Have you read “The Tipping Point“? Many of us have. The growth of sales of the book itself is an example of the idea it attempts to illustrate: ideas can spread like wildfire when they capture a zeitgeist or purport to solve a common problem. It’s a book that contains many great ideas, and provides a pretty interesting layman’s summary of the concept of memetics. Memetics is a concept I spent way too much time studying in University, and which has moved from circles of furry-browed academics and into popular culture since the book’s publication because many people want to “get rich quick”, and almost as many have experienced failure when attempting to put the lessons of Tipping Point into practise. (more…)
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I agree! That’s the trouble with gladwell, he’s a good (make that great) story teller, but his stories are almost always the same. It goes like this:
Gladwell: “Sometimes the darnest thing, something you could hardly ever predict, will make all the difference in the world.”
and your first reaction is “hey that’s neat”
and your second reaction is “wait, how is that even helpful?”
interesting, but not prescriptive.
http://www.thomaspurves.com/2006/04/06/the-trouble-with-gladwell/
Yes. I’ve made the same observations in the past here and here (and to anyone who tells me I should learn how to market better from Gladwell’s book — obviously someone who hasn’t read it). You can definitely set up the conditions to permit a Tipping Point, but you can’t with any specific definitive action cause one to occur.
Like Hush Puppies and Crocs, Tipping Points are more typically user-generated.