Subject: Quality Messengers, Golden Chests, and the Stanford Prison Experiment
Hello All!
I took the GRE yesterday. Didn’t go as well as I was hoping, but it’s done now. I’m happy to take an hour a day back for other activities.
What I’ve Been Up To:
Over the last two weeks I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s, The Tipping Point.
The book explores the precise moment that an idea, product, or disease tips into exponential growth and takes off.
One of the things that Gladwell emphasizes is that oftentimes it takes only a few small tweaks to make a huge difference in how far something spreads.
He draws upon some very cool case studies to illustrate what he calls “The Three Rules of Epidemics”.
These rules are: The Rule of the Few, The Rule of Stickiness, and the Rule of Context.
I’ll go more in-depth on each rule in the remainder of this letter.
If you’re looking for a book to read, this is high on my recommendations list.
3 Rules From The Tipping Point
The Few:
This rule refers to the idea that some people have a massive impact on the spread of a message.
Gladwell divides these high-impact people into three groups.
Connectors – huge networks of friends and acquaintances
Mavens – obsess over the best products and new ideas a market has to offer
Salesmen – believe in a message strongly and excel in persuading others to join the cause
The way that this would typically work is that a Maven would find a new idea, product, or cause worthy of being spread.
They would tell a couple of their friends, one of whom happens to be a Connector.
The Connector broadcasts it out to any of their connections who might be interested.
The Salesmen that connect to the message persuade people within their circles to join.
As the message reaches more and more people, Connectors and Salesmen continue to make an outsized impact on growth through the size of their circles and persuasive powers.
This rule shows that most people make little to no impact on the spread of a message.
Quality of messengers are far more important than quantity of messengers.
Stickiness:
The second rule is the Rule of Stickiness.
Messages can be tweaked and refined in small ways to make them more engaging.
A more engaging (stickier) message will garner more attention and spread farther and faster than it’s less sticky counterpart.
One marketer placed a little gold chest in the corner of coupons and asked potential customers to look for it.
He found that the results blew the prime-time TV ads out of the water, even though they were selling the same product.
Somehow, adding one small interactive element upped the stickiness of the message and translated into more sales for less ad spend.
This rule shows that effort put towards crafting your message does not go to waste.
Test several versions of the same message with stickiness as the goal.
Context:
The last rule is the Rule of Context.
The environment that people are in plays a huge role in their behavior.
New York City found that by enforcing subway tolls and keeping the trains free from graffiti, they were able to cut crime rates in the subway way down.
The Stanford Prison Experiment showed that normal people off the street could be turned into despotic prison guards.
If environment can affect something as dramatic as whether or not a person will commit a crime, it is no wonder that it can influence the spread of a message.
Gladwell found that some of the most successful messages spread through the use of groups.
One example was a book (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood) written with book clubs in mind.
By marketing the book as a book club book, the author was able to tap into the existing structure of book clubs, allowing her book to take off.
This rule shows that the environment around a message is an important consideration.
Changing the environment can make people more receptive to your message.
One of the things that I really like about The Tipping Point is that the author, Malcom Gladwell, has proven that he has a strong understanding of the topic. If he didn’t understand how things spread, he wouldn’t be a best-selling author. The proof is in the pudding.
Peace,
Jacob Lipke
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