Common Guy Vs. Trendsetter
Fast Company has an article on Duncan Watts, a former Columbia University researcher who is at Yahoo! while on sabbatical. It's mandatory reading for any marketing MBA because it tells of Watts' research into how word-of-mouth spreads from one person to another and mainly because it challenges some popular notions in marketing. What he found was that regular people are just as good at setting trends as trendsetters and that the likelihood of a hit is a function of how susceptible that society is at any given time.
Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.
The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.
Why didn't the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn't they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.
Malcolm Gladwell ("Tipping Point," "Blink") chimes in and Steve Levitt ("Freakonomics") is mentioned. Go read it!
Brilliantly interesting experiment. There is a book out called Cool Hunting about finding those influencers. Your point still stands though that its about the value and the appeal of the idea. In the words of one of our esteemed peers "Whatever, if something sucks it sucks."
Posted by: Jared | February 01, 2008 at 05:25 PM
The idea of applying a simulation to an adoption paradigm has some interesting possibilities. Not the least of which is forcing clarification of important factors. The big problem is that the simulation can demonstrate anything. It isn’t counterintuitive at all that the “average Joe” is more likely to start a cascade; there’s, by definition, many more of them to start one. The two unanswered questions I see are: (1) Is it more efficient, given limited resources, to convince an Influencer to endorse my product? (2) What if the Influencers also change the susceptibility of society at large?
Posted by: The Third Derivative | February 02, 2008 at 04:41 PM