What makes an idea or product tick

Just been tracking the sudden rise of Gujjars’ reservation demands (affirmative action for quota in jobs, educational institutions etc.) in India. Even when I come from the area where they have strong presence, I never heard of this demand before and was wondering what has suddenly triggered it to be such a burning issue, overnight.

This prompts you to think how one idea or fashion trend or a potentially dangerous disease spread suddenly while others don’t? What triggers them? How can one particular colour or a movie or hairstyle becomes fashion statement? Why some product or service captures the imagination of so many people while others, equally or more promising ones fail?

This fascinating book – ‘The Tipping Point’ By Malcolm Gladwell gives some riveting explanation on such questions.

Let me summarize how this book explains it.

Any idea/product/fashion trend can be equated to epidemics and to affect a wider population, it has to achieve what is called a Tipping Point.
i.e. various small factors work together to bring about a massive change in people behaviour.
Successful ideas, have three primary characteristics, like a epidemic1) contagiousness 2) rapid change 3) small changes can have big effects

And who actually can help you in making ideas or products achieve tipping point?
For any idea or product or service to be successful, it needs 3 types of key people.


Connectors : People with special gift for bringing the world together. i.e. they know lots of people. If you want your idea, products to achieve tipping point, connect with as many people as you can. And here we are talking about being acquaintances, not close friends. And more connectors you meet, bigger the area of influence through these connectors. It’s like atomic chain reaction. The closer an idea or product comes to a connector, the more power and opportunity it gains !!


Mavens: The ones who accumulates knowledge and are equally interested to distribute that knowledge to others. Mind you, they are not persuader but their intention is to educate and help out of their own will. E.g. some key people would have got convinced about the viability of open source software and they would have enthusiastically told others before it picked up momentum. Or what about some famous bloggers who get a high feeding others with knowledge?


Salesmen: And they do the work pf persuasion. One example I can think of the way Bush and Blair sold about Saddam having WMDs (Hey, you all believed it at that time though you may not think of them good salesmen now)



And the more you read about this current Gujjar reservation issue or Blogging phenomenon or any new trend in fashion, the more you will recognize the importance of these three factors in achieving their tipping point.

So, the key is to identify the mavens, connectors and salesmen and then depending on whether the idea/product/issue is positive or negative, we can either encourage these three factors or we contain them.