Start With Why

 The Tipping Point,
Gladwell identifies 
groups of necessary populations he calls connectors and influencers. 
With little doubt Gladwell's ideas are spot-on. But it still begs the 
question, why should an influencer tell anyone about you? 
Marketers are always trying to influence the influencers, but few 
really know how. We can't dispute that tipping points happen and 
the conditions that Gladwell articulates are right, but can a tipping 
point happen intentionally? They can't just be an accidental 
phenomenon. If they exist, then we should be able to design one, 
and if we can design one, we should be able to design one that lasts 
beyond the initial tip. It's the difference between a fad and an idea 
that changes an industry or society forever.
In his 1962 book
Diffusion of Innovations,
Everett M. Rogers was 
the first to formally describe how innovations spread through so-
ciety. Thirty years later, in his book
Crossing the Chasm,
Geoffrey 
Moore expanded on Rogers's ideas to apply the principle to high-
tech product marketing. But the Law of Diffusion of Innovations 
explains much more than just the spread of innovation or technol-
ogy. It explains the spread of ideas.
If you don't know the law, you're likely already familiar with 
some of its terminology. Our population is broken into five seg-
ments that fall across a bell curve: innovators, early adoptors, early 
majority, late majority and laggards.

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HOW A TIPPING POINT TIPS 
129 
As the law states, the first 2.5 percent of the population are the 
innovators, and the next 13.5 percent are early adopters. Innovators, 
Moore says, pursue new products or ideas aggressively and are 
intrigued by any fundamental advance; being first is a central part 
of their lives. As their name suggests, innovators are the small per-
centage of the population that challenges the rest of us to see and ! 
think of the world a little differently.
Early adopters are similar to innovators in that they appreciate 
the advantages wrought by new ideas or technologies. They are 
early to recognize the value of new ideas and are quite willing to 
put up with imperfection because they can see the potential. Al-
though quick to see the potential and willing to take risks to try new 
technologies or ideas, early adopters are not idea generators like the 
innovators. But both groups are similar, as Moore says, in that they 
rely heavily on their intuition. They trust their gut.
Early adopters, like innovators but to a lesser degree, are willing 
to pay a premium or suffer some level of inconvenience to own a 
product or espouse an idea that feels right. Those on the left side of 
the diffusion curve are the ones who stood in line for six hours to be 
among the first to buy the iPhone, Apple's entry into the mobile 
phone market, even though they could have walked into a store a 
week later and bought one without waiting. Their willingness to 
suffer an inconvenience or pay a premium had less to do with how 

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START WITH WHY 
130 
great the product was and more to do with their own sense of who 
they are. They wanted to be the first.
These are also the personality types who bought flat-screen TVs 
when they first came out even though they cost upwards of $40,000 
and the technology was still far from perfect. My friend Nathan fits 
this profile. I walked around his house once and counted no fewer 
than twelve Bluetooth earpieces for his mobile phone lying around 
his house. I asked him why he had so many. "Did they all break?" I 
queried. "No," he replied, "they came out with a new one." (There 
were also about five laptops, various models of BlackBerry smart 
phones and boxes of other gadgets lying about that never quite 
worked that well.) Nathan is an early adopter.
The next 34 percent of the population are the early majority, fol-
lowed by the late majority, and finally the laggards on the far right 
side of the spectrum. Laggards are the ones who buy touchtone 
phones only because they don't make rotary phones anymore. The 
early and late majority are more practical-minded. For them, 
rational factors matter more. The early majority is slightly more 
comfortable with new ideas or technologies, while the late majority 
is not.
The farther right you go on the curve, the more you will en-
counter the clients and customers who may need what you have, 
but don't necessarily believe what you believe. As clients, they are 
the ones for whom, no matter how hard you work, it's never 
enough. Everything usually boils down to price with them. They are 
rarely loyal. They rarely give referrals and sometimes you may even 
wonder out loud why you still do business with them. "They just 
don't get it," our gut tells us. The importance of identifying this 
group is so that you can avoid doing business with them. Why 
invest good money and energy to go after people who, at the end of 
the day, will do business with you anyway if you meet their 
practical requirements but will never be loyal if you don't? It's not 

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HOW A TIPPING POINT TIPS 
131 
too hard to recognize where people fall on the spectrum once you're 
in a relationship with them; the opportunity is to figure out which is 
which before you decide to work with them.
We all sit at different places on this spectrum depending on the 
product or idea. Most of us are fiercely loyal to certain products and 
ideas at various times and demonstrate left-side-of-the-curve 
behavior. And for other products or ideas we exhibit right-side-of- 
the-curve behavior. When we sit on one side of the spectrum, we 
often have a hard time understanding those on the other side be-
cause their behavior doesn't make sense to us. My sister is an early 
adopter when it comes to fashion trends, whereas I'm firmly in the 
late majority. It was only recently that I finally caved and bought a 
pair of overpriced designer blue jeans. I admit they look good, but I 
still think they aren't worth the money and I can't understand why 
my sister thinks they are.
In contrast, I'm an early adopter for some technologies. I bought 
a Blue-ray DVD player before they had perfected the technology. I 
paid about four or five times more for it compared to a regular DVD 
player. My sister can't understand why I waste my money on all 
that "useless stuff," as she puts it. We will never see eye to eye on 
this stuff.
Each of us assigns different values to different things and our 
behaviors follow accordingly. This is one of the major reasons why 
it is nearly impossible to "convince" someone of the value of your 
products or ideas based on rational arguments and tangible bene-
fits. It's the old Ferrari and Honda Odyssey debate again. Designer 
jean companies (or my sister) can talk to me until they are blue in 
the face about the importance of fabric quality, design and 
workmanship—it goes in one ear and out the other. Similarly, it can 
be proven, beyond a shadow of doubt, the rational benefits of 
choosing a $500 DVD player over a $100 one; my sister won't hear a 
word of it. And so the game of manipulation ensues. Again, al-

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START WITH WHY 
132 
though always effective, manipulations don't breed loyalty and they 
increase costs and stress for all parties involved.
Most people or organizations that have something to sell, be it a 
product, service or idea, hope to achieve some level of mass- market 
success or acceptance. Most hope to penetrate the bell of the curve. 
Getting there, however, is easier said than done. When you ask 
small businesses about their goals, many of them will tell you they 
want to be a billion-dollar business in X number of years. The odds 
of that happening, unfortunately, don't look good. Of the 27 million 
businesses registered in the United States, fewer than 2,000 ever 
reach a billion dollars in annual revenues. And 99.9 percent of all 
businesses in America have fewer than 500 employees. In other 
words, mass-market success is really hard to achieve.
Big companies have similar challenges repeating their mass- 
market success. Just because they've done it once or twice doesn't 
mean they know how to do it every time. The Zune, Microsoft's 
entry into the multigigabyte mp3 player market, for example, was 
pegged to "take on the iPod." It didn't happen. Even if the quality is 
superior, there is more to succeeding than just the product and the 
marketing. Don't forget, the superior Betamax technology did not 
beat out the substandard VHS technology as the standard format for 
videotape in the 1980s. The best does not always win. Like any 
natural law, the Law of Diffusion must be considered if mass- 
market acceptance is important to you. Refusal to do so will cost a 
lot of money and may result in a mediocre success, if not complete 
failure.
There is an irony to mass-market success, as it turns out. It's near 
impossible to achieve if you point your marketing and resources to 
the middle of the bell, if you attempt to woo those who represent 
the middle of the curve without first appealing to the early adopters. 
It can be done, but at massive expense. This is because the early 
majority, according to Rogers, will not try something until someone 

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HOW A TIPPING POINT TIPS 
133 
else has tried it first. The early majority, indeed the entire majority, 
need the recommendation of someone else who has already 
sampled the product or service. They need to know