Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush
Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them."
The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point,
Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells
it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994--until a few New
York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas
followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids
copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush
Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on
advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of
superinfluential types ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred--at the most?")
began wearing the shoes.
An excellent piece deconstructing the very popular "Influentials" idea. Although, I am a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell's writing at the New Yorker, I haven't been nearly as impressed with his books. I am always skeptical of the need to attribute exceeding human influence on strictly random events. Obviously, we are all guilty of this, not just marketers. Duncan Watts is researching the actual influence of Influentials:
In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently
took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo
--has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments
challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email
patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact,
crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading
and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected
person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated
that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly
random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he
argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle
at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a
whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just
don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the
world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."
So he began programming the first computer models of how influence spreads. Like a kid experimenting with The Sims,
Watts created a virtual community of individuals, then "infected" one
with a "virus"--a virtual disease, or contagious idea--to see how far
it would spread. He fiddled with his models, varying the degree and
frequency of "exposure" needed to pass along the virus. He noticed that
the success of an epidemic varied dramatically with seemingly tiny
changes in his virtual society.
The bold above is mine to emphasize that Watts is essentially saying that marketing, just like much else in life, is a stochastic process. The buzzwords that Gladwell invented in The Tipping Point are just that - words:
Gladwell's book laid out many other factors that can "tip" a trend.
He described other influential types: Mavens, who love to collect
information and help others make decisions, and suave Salesmen of
ideas. In order to spread, an idea or product had to be "sticky," and
appear in a fertile social context. But as The Tipping Point
climbed the charts, marketers fixated on Gladwell's Law of the Few, his
suggestion that rare, highly connected people shape the world. For
anyone involved in pitchmanship, it was an electrifying notion, one
that took a highly complex phenomenon--the spread of memes through
society--and made it simple. Reach the gatekeepers, and you reach the
world.
Marketers seized on Malcolm Gladwell's "Law of the Few," his suggestion That rare, highly connected people shape the world.
But
Watts, for one, didn't think the gatekeeper model was true. It
certainly didn't match what he'd found studying networks. So he decided
to test it in the real world by remounting the Milgram experiment on a
massive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000
people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure
enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the
chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he
found that "hubs"--highly connected people--weren't crucial. Sure, they
existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these
superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much
more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to
another, until they arrived at the target.
So what was the issue with one of the most cited studies in marketing? Sample size:
Why did Milgram get it wrong? Watts thinks it's simply because his
sample was so small--only a few dozen letters reached their mark. The
dominance of the three friends could have been a statistical accident.
"And since Milgram's finding sort of made sense, nobody even bothered
to redo the experiment," Watts shrugs. But when you perform the
experiment with hundreds of successfully completed letters, a different
picture emerges: Influentials don't govern person-to-person
communication. We all do.
The more Watts examined the theory of
Influentials, the less sense it made to him. The problem, he explains
over lunch in a Midtown restaurant, is that it's incredibly vague. None
of its proponents ever clearly explain how an Influential actually
influences.
So, what's the upshot to Watts' research? It's something that many an entrepreneur that has dared to try and create a market has learned:
"If society is ready to embrace a trend,
almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can,"
Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of
finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the
public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But
since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in
Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."
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?
