The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

The Law of the Few indicates that “the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts” (33), namely Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

Connectors “link us up with the world” and have “a special gift for bringing the world together” (38). Connectors know many people from “different worlds and subcultures and niches” (48). Gladwell uses the Chicago Connector Lois Weisberg, who worked as the city's cultural commissioner and promoted public arts, as an example. Weisberg had a wealth of contacts from various worlds, including actors, writers, doctors, lawyers, and politicians. Like all the best Connectors, she had “a foot in so many different worlds, [she had] the effect of bringing them all together” (51) at her racially integrated salons in the 1950s and continued these efforts in the large-scale public arts programs she developed. Connectors can find something interesting about anybody, and they thrive among acquaintances and the weak ties that characterize these relationships. The sociologist Mark Granovetter writes that acquaintances “represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are” (54). Just as closeness to a Connector can make a person more powerful, the proximity of ideas and products to Connectors makes them more powerful. Word-of-mouth epidemics take off when information about them reaches the ears of an influential Connector who has the social gifts to spread it widely.

Mavens are “information specialists” (59) who are “socially motivated” (62) to pass along their information, like market mavens who know all the best deals and can’t help but tell all their friends about them. Mark Alpert is an “almost pathologically helpful” Maven from the Midwest who, like all Mavens, “wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his own” (66). The Maven’s role in starting epidemics includes their possession of information that is hidden from most other people. Importantly, they pass along this information not for self-serving reasons, but out of a kind of altruism; they want only to help.

Salesmen have “the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing” (70) and are of equal importance to Connectors and Mavens in the success of word-of-mouth epidemics. Gladwell identifies the financial planner Tom Gau as a perfect Salesman who personifies the “indefinable trait […] that makes people who meet him want to agree with him” (73). Research showed that the journalist Peter Jennings’s subtle facial bias in favor of Ronald Reagan during his nightly television news coverage of the 1984 presidential election actually affected the voting behavior of his audience. This demonstrates that with Salesmen, “little things can […] make as much of a difference as big things” (78). How one says things can be at least as important as what one says, and people are usually unaware that they are being influenced in subtle ways, as in the case of Jennings. Salesmen like Gau can “draw others into [their] own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction” (83), making them difficult to resist. They are also emotionally contagious; a charismatic person like Gau can “infect the other people in the room with his or her emotions” (86).