The Tipping Point Read online

  It is not surprising, then, that when the British army began its secret campaign in 1774 to root out and destroy the stores of arms and ammunition held by the fledgling revolutionary movement, Revere became a kind of unofficial clearing house for the anti British forces. He knew everybody. He was the logical one to go to if you were a stable boy on the afternoon of April 18th, 1775, and overheard two British officers talking about how there would be hell to pay on the following afternoon. Nor is it surprising that when Revere set out for Lexington that night, he would have known just how to spread the news as far and wide as possible. When he saw people on the roads, he was so naturally and irrepressibly social he would have stopped and told them. When he came upon a town, he would have known exactly whose door to knock on, who the local militia leader was, who the key players in town were. He had met most of them before. And they knew and respected him as well.

  But William Dawes? Fischer finds it inconceivable that Dawes could have ridden all seventeen miles to Lexington and not spoken to anyone along the way. But he clearly had none of the social gifts of Revere, because there is almost no record of anyone who remembers him that night. “Along Paul Revere’s northern route, the town leaders and company captains instantly triggered the alarm,” Fischer writes. “On the southerly circuit of William Dawes, that did not happen until later. In at least one town it did not happen at all. Dawes did not awaken the town fathers or militia commanders in the towns of Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown, or Waltham.” Why? Because Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown, and Waltham were not Boston. And Dawes was in all likelihood a man with a normal social circle, which means that—like most of us—once he left his hometown he probably wouldn’t have known whose door to knock on. Only one small community along Dawes’s ride appeared to get the message, a few farmers in a neighborhood called Waltham Farms. But alerting just those few houses wasn’t enough to tip the alarm. Word of mouth epidemics are the work of Connectors. William Dawes was just an ordinary man.

  6.

  It would be a mistake, however, to think that Connectors are the only people who matter in a social epidemic. Roger Horchow sent out a dozen faxes promoting his daughter’s friend’s new restaurant. But he didn’t discover that restaurant. Someone else did and told him about it. At some point in the rise of Hush Puppies, the shoes were discovered by Connectors, who broadcast the return of Hush Puppies far and wide. But who told the Connectors about Hush Puppies? It’s possible that Connectors learn about new information by an entirely random process, that because they know so many people they get access to new things wherever they pop up. If you look closely at social epidemics, however, it becomes clear that just as there are people we rely upon to connect us to other people, there are also people we rely upon to connect us with new information. There are people specialists, and there are information specialists.

  Sometimes, of course, these two specialties are one and the same. Part of the particular power of Paul Revere, for example, was that he wasn’t just a networker; he wasn’t just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston. He was also actively engaged in gathering information about the British. In the fall of 1774, he set up a secret group that met regularly at the Green Dragon Tavern with the express purpose of monitoring British troop movements. In December of that year, the group learned that the British intended to seize a cache of ammunition being stored by a colonial militia near the entrance to Portsmouth Harbor, fifty miles north of Boston. On the icy morning of December 13th, Revere rode north through deep snow to warn the local militia that the British were on their way. He helped find out the intelligence, and he passed it on. Paul Revere was a Connector. But he was also—and this is the second of the three kinds of people who control word of mouth epidemics—a Maven.

  The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge. In recent years, economists have spent a great deal of time studying Mavens, for the obvious reason that if marketplaces depend on information, the people with the most information must be the most important. For example, sometimes when a supermarket wants to increase sales of a given product, they’ll put a promotion sticker in front of it, saying something like “Everyday Low Price!” The price will stay the same. The product will just be featured more prominently. When they do that, supermarkets find that invariably the sales of the product will go through the roof, the same way they would if the product had actually been put on sale.

  This is, when you think about it, a potentially disturbing piece of information. The whole premise behind sales, or supermarket specials, is that we, as consumers, are very aware of the prices of things and will react accordingly: we buy more in response to lower prices and less in response to higher prices. But if we’ll buy more of something even if the price hasn’t been lowered, then what’s to stop supermarkets from never lowering their prices? What’s to stop them from cheating us with meaningless “everyday low price” signs every time we walk in? The answer is that although most of us don’t look at prices, every retailer knows that a very small number of people do, and if they find something amiss—a promotion that’s not really a promotion—they’ll do something about it. If a store tried to pull the sales stunt too often, these are the people who would figure it out and complain to management and tell their friends and acquaintances to avoid the store. These are the people who keep the marketplace honest. In the ten years or so since this group was first identified, economists have gone to great lengths to understand them. They have found them in every walk of life and in every socioeconomic group. One name for them is “price vigilantes.” The other, more common, name for them is “Market Mavens.”

  Linda Price, a marketing professor at the University of Nebraska and a pioneer in Maven research, has made videotapes of interviews she’s done with a number of Mavens. In one, a very well dressed man talks with great animation about how he goes about shopping. Here is the segment, in full:

  Because I follow the financial pages closely, I start to see trends. A classic example is with coffee. When the first coffee crunch came ten years ago, I had been following the thing about Brazilian frost and what it would do to the long term price of coffee, and so I said I’m going to stockpile coffee.

  At this point in the interview, an enormous smile breaks across the man’s face.

  I ended up with probably somewhere between thirty five and forty cans of coffee. And I got them at these ridiculous prices, when the three pound cans were $2.79 and $2.89....Today it’s about $6 for a three pound can. I had fun doing that.

  Do you see the level of obsession here? He can remember prices, to the cents, of cans of coffee he bought ten years ago.

  The critical thing about Mavens, though, is that they aren’t passive collectors of information. It isn’t just that they are obsessed with how to get the best deal on a can of coffee. What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too. “A Maven is a person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This person likes to initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests,” Price says. “They like to be helpers in the marketplace. They distribute coupons. They take you shopping. They go shopping for you....They distribute about four times as many coupons as other people. This is the person who connects people to the marketplace and has the inside scoop on the marketplace. They know where the bathroom is in retail stores. That’s the kind of knowledge they have.” They are more than experts. An expert, says Price, will “talk about, say, cars because they love cars. But they don’t talk about cars because they love you, and want to help you with your decision. The Market Maven will. They are more socially motivated.”

  Price says that well over half of Americans know a Maven, or someone close to the Maven’s description. She herself, in fact, based the concept around someone she met when she was in graduate school, a man so memorable that his personality serves as the basis for what is now an entire field of research in the marketing world.

 
; “I was doing my Ph.D. at the University of Texas,” Price said. “At the time I didn’t realize it, but I met the perfect Maven. He’s Jewish and it was Easter and I was looking for a ham and I asked him. And he said, well, you know I am Jewish, but here’s the deli you should go to and here’s the price you should pay.” Price started laughing at the memory. “You should look him up. His name is Mark Alpert.”

  7.

  Mark Alpert is a slender, energetic man in his fifties. He has dark hair and a prominent nose and two small, burning, intelligent eyes. He talks quickly and precisely and with absolute authority. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t say that it was hot yesterday. He would say that we had a high of 87 degrees yesterday. He doesn’t walk up stairs. He runs up them, like a small boy. He gives the sense that he is interested in and curious about everything, that, even at his age, if you gave him a children’s chemistry set he would happily sit down right then and there and create some strange new concoction.

  Alpert grew up in the Midwest, the son of a man who ran the first discount store in northern Minnesota. He got his doctorate from the University of Southern California and now teaches at the University of Texas School of Business Administration. But there is really no connection between his status as an economist and his Mavenism. Were Alpert a plumber, he would be just as exacting and thorough and knowledgeable about the ways of the marketplace.

  We met over lunch at a restaurant on the lakefront in Austin. I got there first and chose a table. He got there second and persuaded me to move to another table, which he said was better. It was. I asked him about how he buys whatever he buys, and he began to talk. He explained why he has cable TV, as opposed to a dish. He gave me the inside scoop on Leonard Maltin’s new movie guide. He gave me the name of a contact at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan who is very helpful in getting a great deal. (“Malcolm, the hotel is ninety nine dollars. And the rack rate is a hundred and eighty nine dollars!”) He explained what a rack rate is. (The initial, but soft, retail asking price for a hotel room.) He pointed at my tape recorder. “I think your tape is finished,” he said. It was. He explained why I should not buy an Audi. (“They’re Germans, so it’s a pain dealing with them. For a while they would give you an under the counter warranty, but they don’t anymore. The dealer network is small, so it’s hard to get service. I love driving them. I don’t like owning them.” What I should drive, he told me, is a Mercury Mystique because they drive like a much more expensive European sedan. “They aren’t selling well, so you can get a good deal. You go to a fleet buyer. You go in on the twenty fifth of the month. You know this...”) Then he launched into an impossibly long, sometimes hilarious, description of the several months he took to buy a new TV. If you or I had gone through the same experience—which involved sending televisions back, and laborious comparison of the tiniest electronic details and warranty fine print—I suspect we would have found it hellish. Alpert, apparently, found it exhilarating. Mavens, according to Price, are the kinds of people who are avid readers of Consumer Reports. Alpert is the kind of Maven who writes to Consumer Reports to correct them. “One time they said that the Audi 4000 was based on the Volkswagen Dasher. This was the late 1970s. But the Audi 4000 is a bigger car. I wrote them a letter. Then there was the Audi 5000 fiasco. Consumer Reports put them on their list of thou shalt not buy because of this sudden acceleration problem. But I read up on the problem in the literature and came to believe it was bogus....So I wrote them and I said, you really ought to look into this. I gave them some information to consider. But I didn’t hear back from them. It annoyed the hell out of me. They are supposed to be beyond that.” He shook his head in disgust. He had out Mavened the Maven bible.

  Alpert is not, it should be said, an obnoxious know it all. It’s easy to see how he could be, of course. Even Alpert is aware of that. “I was standing next to a kid in the supermarket who had to show his I.D. to buy cigarettes,” Alpert told me. “I was very tempted to tell him I was diagnosed with lung cancer. In a way, that desire to be of service and influence—whatever it is—can be taken too far. You can become nosy. I try to be a very passive Maven....You have to remember that it’s their decision. It’s their life.” What saves him is that you never get the sense that he’s showing off. There’s something automatic, reflexive, about his level of involvement in the marketplace. It’s not an act. It’s very similar to the social instinct of Horchow and Weisberg. At one point Alpert launched into a complicated story of how to make the best use of coupons in renting videos at Blockbuster. Then he stopped himself, as if he realized what he was saying, and burst out laughing. “Look, you can save a whole dollar! In a year’s time I could probably save enough for a whole bottle of wine.” Alpert is almost pathologically helpful. He can’t help himself. “A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his own,” Alpert said, which is true, although what I suspect is that the opposite is also true, that a Maven is someone who solves his own problems—his own emotional needs—by solving other people’s problems. Something in Alpert was fulfilled in knowing that I would thereafter buy a television or a car or rent a hotel room in New York armed with the knowledge he had given me.

  “Mark Alpert is a wonderfully unselfish man,” Leigh MacAllister, a colleague of his at the University of Texas, told me. “I would say he saved me fifteen thousand dollars when I first came to Austin. He helped me negotiate the purchase of a house, because he understands the real estate game. I needed to get a washer and dryer. He got me a deal. I needed to get a car. I wanted to get a Volvo because I wanted to be just like Mark. Then he showed me an on line service that had the prices of Volvos all over the State of Texas and went with me to buy the car. He helped me through the maze of all the retirement plans at the University of Texas. He simplified everything. He has everything processed. That’s Mark Alpert. That’s a Market Maven. God bless him. He’s what makes the American system great.”

  8.

  What makes people like Mark Alpert so important in starting epidemics? Obviously they know things that the rest of us don’t. They read more magazines than the rest of us, more newspapers, and they may be the only people who read junk mail. Mark Alpert happens to be a connoisseur of electronic equipment. If there was a breakthrough new television or videocamera, and you were a friend of his, you can bet you would hear all about it quickly. Mavens have the knowledge and the social skills to start word of mouth epidemics. What sets Mavens apart, though, is not so much what they know but how they pass it along. The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because they like to help, turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention.

  This is surely part of the explanation for why Paul Revere’s message was so powerful on the night of his midnight ride. News of the British march did not come by fax, or by means of a group e-mail. It wasn’t broadcast on the nightly news, surrounded by commercials. It was carried by a man, a volunteer, riding on a cold night with no personal agenda other than a concern for the liberty of his peers. With Hush Puppies as well, perhaps the shoes caught the attention of Connectors precisely because they weren’t part of any self conscious, commercial fashion trend. Maybe a fashion Maven went to the East Village, looking for new ideas, and found out that you could get these really cool old Hush Puppies at a certain thrift store, for a very good price, and told his friends, who bought the shoes for themselves because there is something about the personal, disinterested, expert opinion of a Maven that makes us all sit up and listen. And why are the Zagat restaurant guides so popular? Partly it is because they are a convenient guide to all the restaurants in a given town. But their real power derives from the fact that the reviews are the reports of volunteers—of diners who want to share their opinions with others. Somehow that represents a more compelling recommendation than the opinion of an expert whose job it is to rate restaurants.

  When I was talking to Alpert, I happened to mention that I was going to be in Los Angeles in a few wee
ks. “There is a place I really like, in Westwood,” he said, without hesitation. “The Century Wilshire. It’s a European bed and breakfast. They have very nice rooms. A heated pool. Underground parking. Last time I was there, five, six years ago, rooms started in the seventies and junior suites were a hundred and ten. They’ll give you a rate for a week. They’ve got an 800 number.” Since he was, after all, the Ur Maven, I stayed at the Century Wilshire when I was in L.A., and it was everything he said it was and more. Within a few weeks of coming home, I had—completely out of character, I might add—recommended the Century Wilshire to two friends of mine, and within the month two more, and as I began to imagine how many people of those I told about the hotel had told about the hotel, and how many people like me Mark Alpert had himself told about the hotel, I realized that I had stepped into the middle of a little Mark Alpert–generated, word of mouth epidemic. Alpert, of course, probably doesn’t know as many people as a Connector like Roger Horchow, so he doesn’t quite have the same raw transmission power. But then again, if Roger Horchow talked to you on the eve of a trip to Los Angeles, he might not give you advice on where to stay. Alpert always would. And if Horchow did make a recommendation, you might take him up on it or you might not. You would take the advice as seriously as you take advice from any friend. But if Mark Alpert gave you advice, you would always take it. A Connector might tell ten friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them might take his advice. A Maven might tell five people where to stay in Los Angeles but make the case for the hotel so emphatically that all of them would take his advice. These are different personalities at work, acting for different reasons. But they both have the power to spark word of mouth epidemics.