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TIPPING POINTS
Viral Marketing
Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller
• Thomas Schelling (Nobel
Prize winner) first
introduced the concept of
“tipping points” in 1972
• Malcolm Gladwell
popularized the concept in
his best seller
Downside of traditional
marketing/advertising
• Cost:
– TV and print ads are expensive
• Media clutter:
– It is difficult for products to stand out
against the background of advertising
• Cynicism:
– Consumers, especially Gen X and Gen Y
consumers, are jaded and cynical about
“obvious” marketing
• TIVO, DVRs:
– Consumers can avoid TV commercials
altogether
• Segmentation:
– Consumers aren’t heterogeneous, they
are segmented into different markets
Viral Marketing
• Steve Jurvetson and Tim Draper coined the
term “viral marketing” in 1997.
• a.k.a. below the radar marketing, buzz
marketing, stealth advertising
• Relies on word-of-mouth (WOM)
endorsements
– like a virus, word about a product or
service spreads from one consumer to
another
Examples, intentional and
unintentional
• Live Strong bracelets (and
the whole wrist band craze)
• Ipods, Iphones
• accessory dogs
• “Support Our Troops”
stickers
• Juicy Couture handbags
• Hip Hop (culture as a
commodity)
More examples of buzz gone wild
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Pinkberry
Razor scooters
Harry Potter books
Wii Fit
YouTube
MySpace, Facebook
Blogs, blogging, the
blogosphere
Methods and techniques
• Poseurs: “ordinary person at a
bar, in line at a concert, at a
soccer field
– Sony Ericcson hired 120 actors
and actresses to play tourists at
popular attractions around the
country.The “tourists” asked
passersby to take their picture
with a T68i cell phone that
featured a digital camera
• Trendsetters and early adopters
– Use of “cool hunters” and
“trend spotters”
• Imitation, social modeling
– yellow magnetic ribbons
saying “Support the Troops”
• Email, chat rooms, and blogs
• Manufactured controversies:
– Ambercrombie & Fitch sold
thong underwear in children’s
sizes, with the words “eye
candy” printed on the front
Malcolm Gladwell’s notion of
“Tipping Points”
• Tipping point:
– the threshold or critical point at which an
idea, product, or message takes off or
reaches critical mass.
• Viral theory of marketing:
– ideas and messages can be contagious just
like diseases
• The law of the few
– It doesn’t take large numbers of people to
generate a trend
– A select few enjoy a disproportionate
amount of influence over the spread of
social trends
Tipping points--continued
• The stickiness factor
– idea, message, or product has to be “sticky” or
inherently attractive
– idea must be memorable, practical, personal,
novel
– hard to manufacture this feature
• Power of context
– must happen at the right time, place
– for example, social networking (MySpace,
Facebook) wouldn’t be possible without
widespread access to the Internet
– rule of 150: Groups grow too large and loose
cohesion at 150
Key influencers
• Connectors: know everybody, are networkers, have many
contacts
– “Connectors are social glue: they spread it.” (Gladwell)
– Have large social circles
• Mavens: possess information, expertise, and seek to share it
– “Mavens are data banks. They provide the message”
(Gladwell)
– Are “in the know”
• Salesman: are persuasive
– Charismatic types
– Often rely on “soft” influence
• Note: All three types are needed for a phenomenon to take-off
Other concerns
• Scalability: message must be able to go from very
small to very large without “gearing up.”
– Wii couldn’t ramp up manufacturing and lost
millions in sales.
• Effortless transfer: message must be passed on for
free, or nearly free, or “coast” on existing
networks.
The downside
• Not that scientific
– evidence is largely
anecdotal
– phenomenon isn’t that
reliable, predictable
– A bit of a “finger in the
wind” approach to
marketing
• viral marketing” is
something of an
oxymoron.
– The more viral marketing is
planned or contrived, the
less likely it is to succeed;
• Momentum may not reach
the tipping point
– no guarantee the initial
“buzz” will become
contagious.
– difficult to orchestrate word
of mouth
• Trends come and go
quickly
– like a contagion, a trend can
die out quickly or be
replaced by a new trend