We're all mavens now

The current (and pretty recent) marketing wisdom is that a handful of trend-setting individuals are disproportionately responsible for the "viral" dissemination, and therefore success, of new products and ideas. Malcolm Gladwell popularised this notion in The Tipping Point, writing 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 skills". These people are Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. Get the right handful onside, the theory goes, and you've got a hit.

Probably the most interesting and important thing I read last year was the article by Duncan Watts in the New York Times in which he put forward a theory of cumulative advantage in social trends - that small variations in the initial popularity of, for example, a song can cause huge differences in its popular reception. "If one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still", he wrote, explaining an experiment he'd carried out in which more than 14,000 music fans

"registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another...In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable."

Songs that start out more popular will get a lot more popular quickly, because people are influenced in their choices by what they think other people like. So far so sensible: we have more options than we have time to filter thoroughly ourselves so we allow ourselves to be guided by the choices of others. (Perhaps, incidentally, this accounts for the contentious but regularly-cited observation that people enjoy wine more of they think it more expensive: in an efficient market price should usually be an adequate proxy for popularity, so we become accustomed to working out which wine is most popular from the price, and simply raising the price of a bottle games this usually effective workaround.)

Duncan Watts' latest research (FastCompany) indicates that the idea of the Influentials, a coterie of disproportionately powerful consumers who can "tip" a product from miss to hit, is nonsense.

"Watts believes...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...If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one - and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an 'accidental Influential.'" (HT: Adverlab)

It is an understandably compelling notion for both marketers and the brands they represent that if they can persuade just the right handful of people to talk a product up the mass market will follow. The problem is that the notion seems to be flatly repudiated by the evidence. Brands are understandably keen to find some marketing-driven short-cut to the expensive and time-consuming slog of working out what people really want, producing it and selling it to them. But if Watts is right there is no such shortcut. Success in the market depends on getting the product right and telling everyone about it, even if it sounds too simple to be true.