The Entrepreneur’s Bookshelf: The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

A lot of people always tell me that this is a marketing book. Actually, what they did not know, the law of epidemics that drives the tipping point is a concept from physics known as self-organized criticality. Malcolm Gladwell explain that the tipping point is a moment when an idea, trend or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like wildfire into an epidemic. He characterized this phenomenon as a precisely targeted push that will cause a fashion trend. A simple example for the reader is the trend of blogging in the internet. As a matter of fact, blogs have existed in the form of an online diary back in the days of dot.com boom. Well, it takes repackaging and new initiatives that suddenly made it popular for the commoon people to start blogging. Some people called it online diary while others give terms like “citizen journalism” and etc.

Gladwell characterizes how the tipping point can arise, via three characteristics. If you want to market something out to the masses, you need these ingredients to make it work:

1. Contagiousness: the feature in the product that you market can “infect” others. Actually, if you want an example, think of how mac fans evangelizes their product.
2. Little causes can trigger big effects: First you start with a group of people, and each one of them spread to another ten, and the same exponential growth occurs, you start to see an avalanche coming.
3. The critical state came about not gradually but at one dramatic moment: someething causes a big event, for example, suddenly, I-Pods become the norm in society as compared to Creative Zen players which did not take off.

For anyone, it is a good book to understand how market forces work and at the same make them work for you. I will strongly recommend it that you pick it up from the library close by or from a bookstore. As for the copy in my hands, it was a Christmas present from a student of mine.

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