Cockeyed Optimist

A few days ago (June 27) I posted a short piece about Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

I’ve just started reading an earlier best-seller of his, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

This is turning out to be another fascinating read, but it has particular interest for me, and anyone else who is looking to use their blog to generate income.

His thesis, in a nutshell, is that many phenomena as different as sudden changes in city crime rates, school shooting incidents, fashions in shoes, the spread of diseases like Aids or flu, behave in similar ways.

We can accept that Aids and flu are epidemics, but Gladwell makes a case for treating these other effects like epidemics, too. So there can be an ‘epidemic’ in the popularity of Hush Puppy shoes, or the spread of information, or the awareness of a new trend.

This is very interesting in the context of marketing; if we could understand what factors could be used as the tipping point or trigger to switch on the demand for a product or a service that we are trying to provide, this could be the key to drastically increasing our sales.

I can hardly wait to get into the rest of this book!
[I would do! - here is the piece I would write in the future.]

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