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

Content Warning: The section features frank discussions of suicide and drug use.

Gladwell illustrates the ideas he develops throughout the prior chapters by focusing on a few specific cases, including the rise in popularity of Airwalk shoes and the construction of a rumor surrounding a Chinese tourist in America in 1945.

Airwalk was a niche skateboard company with a small, devoted following that exploded or “tipped” in the mid-1990s during its partnership with the advertisement agency Lambesis, which ran numerous print ads for Airwalk in hot spots like alternative magazines. Airwalk’s advertising “was founded very explicitly on the principles of epidemic transmission” (196) that enabled it to tip. Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross’s idea of “the diffusion model” illustrates Airwalk’s gradual success: Innovators are the first to try a new technology or way of doing things; Early Adopters—“opinion leaders in the community” (197)—take it on next; and then the Early and Late Majority people make it mainstream. This language is compatible with Gladwell’s earlier discussion of Connectors, Salesmen, and Mavens, who are responsible for making new things “palatable for mainstream people” (200) by tweaking the original item slightly to make it suitable for the masses.