Is the Tipping Point Toast?

By: Clive ThompsonMon Jan 28, 2008 at 6:05 PM

Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.

Order Versus Chaos
Duncan Watts's research tells advertising execs precisely what they don't want to hear: All their clever (and lucrative!) targeted viral campaigning may ultimately be less effective than good old mass marketing.
Infographic: Order Versus Chaos

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Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

It should come as no surprise that marketers have not all warmed to Watts's work. In September, he presented his findings to a standing-room-only crowd at a meeting of the Advertising Research Foundation. Ed Keller--The Influentials coauthor himself--then gave a polite but heated rebuttal.

Watts's computer models are "interesting," Keller admitted, but too academic to reflect reality. In contrast, Keller argues, his firm has studied tens of thousands of Influentials by identifying people highly active in their communities, an elite 10% that engage in advice-giving conversation up to five times more frequently than the average American. "They're fonts of word of mouth," Keller insists. And ahead of the curve, too: In the 20 years he has been polling them, Keller has found they began using computers, mobile phones, and the Internet years before the mainstream. What's more, his polls have found that more than two-thirds of people who get word-of-mouth product recommendations either buy something based on it, or plan to.

"The data are crystal clear," Keller adds, when I call him up. "They give and receive advice more. If I had $100 to spend, and I could spend it focusing on the mass market or I could put some chips on a group that could get me somewhere between two and five times as much energy with word of mouth, well, they're going to get my message out more quickly and more efficiently." He points to a recent example: Before Nintendo launched its hugely successful Wii video-game console last year, it handed out thousands of demo units to "mom influencers" around the country, creating a "built-in base of evangelists."

In any case, Keller concludes, "Duncan is making a straw-man argument. Because nobody, including myself, thinks that Influencers are the only group of consumers who matter."

Keller makes good points (although it's a bit hard to swallow his last assertion, given that the subtitle of his book flatly states that "one American in 10 tells the other 9 how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy"). And even Watts, for all his bombast, can be quite self-critical. "My models might be totally wrong," he says cheerfully. "But at least I'm clear about what I'm saying. You can look at them, and tell me if you disagree. But none of these other thinkers are actually clear about what they're saying. You can't tell if they're wrong."

No researcher, he points out--including Keller--ever analyzes interactions between specific Influentials and the friends they're supposedly influencing; no one observes influence in action. In essence, Keller appeals to common sense--our intuitive sense of how the world works. Watts thinks common sense is misleading.

Mind you, Watts does agree that some people are more instrumental than others. He simply doesn't think it's possible to will a trend into existence by recruiting highly social people. The network effects in society, he argues, are too complex--too weird and unpredictable--to work that way. If it were just a matter of tipping the crucial first adopters, why can't most companies do it reliably?

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they've broken out. "They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they've identified the people who did it first, and then they go, 'Okay, these are the Influentials!'" But who's to say those aren't just Watts's accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn't their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?

For his part, Gladwell is diplomatic. "Duncan Watts is exceedingly clever, and I've learned a great deal from his research," he emailed me. "In the end, though, I suppose that I feel the same ways about his insights as I do about Steve Levitt's disagreements with me over the causes of the decline in violent crime in the 1990s. I think that all books like The Tipping Point or articles by academics can ever do is uncover a little piece of the bigger picture, and one day--when we put all those pieces together--maybe we'll have a shot at the truth."

From Issue 122 | February 2008

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Recent Comments | 66 Total

February 9, 2008 at 3:12am by Achara M

Influentials as described by Watts seem to be only one-dimensional - they only need to more socially-connected than others to be thrown into the Influentials category.

Does his simulations take into account the characteristics of the Mavens (those who know alot) and Salesmen (charismatic, persuasive pple) put forth in 'The Tipping Point'? It doesn't sound like it.

His simulations would be most accurate to describe online viral effects, not the adoption of trends in products and services in the real world. When you're analyzing trends in real-life consumer behaviour you need to take into consideration the behaviour of the Keller's 'leading edge' influencers, as well as the social context, such economic health, and social and commercial patterns in that geographical location.

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

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Recent Comments | 66 Total

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