- 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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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.
This is an interesting read about demystifying the role of influencers in viral marketing. Granted, the article is almost two years old, but I found some of the concepts that they bring up to make a lot of sense, especially in the current climate of social networking.
