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THE TIPPING How POINT Little Can Make Things a Big Difference MALCOLM GLADWELL LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY BOSTON • NEW YORK • LONDON Copyright © 2000 by Malcolm Gladwell All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. First Edition The author is grateful for permission to include the following previously copyrighted material: Excerpts from interviews on Market Mavens videotape by Linda Price, Lawrence F. Feick, and Audrey Guskey. Reprinted by permission of the authors. Exerpts from Daniel Wegner, "Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1991), vol. 61, no. 6. Reprinted by permission of the author. Exerpts from Donald H. Rubinstein, "Love and Suffering: Adolescent Socialization and Suicide in Micronesia," Contemporary Pacific (Spring 1995), vol. 7, no. l, and "Epidemic Suicide Among Micronesian Adolescents." Social Science and Medicine (1983). vol. 17. Reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpts from Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gladwell Malcolm. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference / by Malcolm Gladwell. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN0-316-31696-2 1. Social psychology, 2. Contagion (Social psychology) 3. Causation. 4. Context effects (Psychology) I. Title. HM1033.G53 2000 302--dc21 99-047576 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Design: Meryl Sussman Levavi/Digitext, Inc. Printed in the United States of America To Joyce and my parents, Graham Gladwell Contents Introduction 3 ONE T h e T h r e e Rules of E p i d e m i c s 15 TWO T h e L a w of t h e F e w : C o n n e c t o r s , M a v e n s , and Salesmen THREE The Stickiness Factor: Sesame Street, Blue's Clues, and the E d u c a t i o n a l Virus 89 30 VIII THF TIPPING POINT FOUR The Power of C o n t e x t ( P a r t O n e ) : Bernie G o e t z and the Rise and Fall of N e w York C i t y C r i m e 133 FIVE The Power of C o n t e x t (Part Two): The Magic N u m b e r O n e H u n d r e d and Fifty 169 SIX Case S t u d y : R u m o r s , S n e a k e r s , and the P o w e r of T r a n s l a t i o n 193 SEVEN Case Study: Suicide, Smoking, and the Search for the Unsticky Cigarette 216 EIGHT Conclusion: F o c u s , Test, and Believe Endnotes 260 Acknowledgments Index 253 273 271 THE TIPPING POINT Introduction or Hush Puppies — the classic American brushed-suede shoes with the lightweight crepe sole —- the Tipping Point came somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995. The brand had been all but dead until that point. Sales were down to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and small-town family stores. Wolverine, the company that makes Hush Puppies, was thinking of phasing out the shoes that made them famous. But then something strange happened. At a fashion shoot, two Hush Puppies executives — Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis — ran into a stylist from New York who told them that the classic Hush Puppies had suddenly become hip in the clubs and bars of downtown Manhattan. "We were being told," Baxter recalls, "that there were resale shops in the Village, in Soho, where the shoes were being sold. People were going to the Ma and Pa stores, the little stores that still carried them, and buying them up." Baxter and Lewis F 4 THE TIPPING POINT were baffled at first. It made no sense to them that shoes that were so obviously out of fashion could make a comeback. "We were told that Isaac Mizrahi was wearing the shoes himself," Lewis says. "I think it's fair to say thai at the time we had no idea who Isaac Mizrahi was." By the fall of 1995, things began to happen in a rush. first the designer John Bartlctt called. He wanted to use I lush Puppies in his spring collection. Then another Man hattan designer, Anna Sui, called, wanting shoes for her show as well. In Los Angeles, the designer Joel Fitzgerald put a twenty-five-foot inflatable basset hound — the symbol of the Hush Puppies brand — on the roof of his Hollywood store and gutted an adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies boutique. While he was still painting and putting up shelves, the actor Pee-wee Herman walked in and asked for a couple of pairs. "It was total word of mouth," Fitzgerald remembers. In 1995, the company sold 450,000 pairs of the classic Hush Puppies, and the next year it sold lour times that, and the year after that still more, until Hush Puppies were once again a staple of the wardrobe of the young American male. In 1996, Hush Puppies won the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers awards dinner at Lincoln Center, and the president of the firm stood up On the stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and accepted an award for an achievement that — as he would be the first to admit — his company had almost nothing to do with. Hush Puppies had suddenly exploded, and it all started with a handful of kids in the East Village and Soho. How did that happen? Those first few kids, whoever they were, weren't deliberately trying to promote Hush