SIX

Case Study

RUMORS, SNEAKERS, AND THE POWER OF TRANSLATION

Airwalking is the name given to the skateboarding move in which the skater takes off from a ramp, slips his board out from under his feet, and then takes one or two long, exaggerated strides in the air before landing. It is a classic stunt, a staple of traditional skateboarding, which is why when two entrepreneurs decided in the mid-1980s to start manufacturing athletic shoes aimed at hard-core skateboarders, they called the company Airwalk. Airwalk was based outside San Diego and rooted in the teenage beach-and-skate culture of the region. In the beginning, the firm made a canvas shoe in wild colors and prints that became a kind of alternative fashion statement. They also made a technical skate shoe in suede, with a thick sole and a heavily-cushioned upper that — at least at first — was almost as stiff as the skateboard itself. But the skaters became so devoted to the product that they would wash the shoes over and again, then drive over them in cars to break them in. Airwalk was cool. It sponsored professional skateboarders, and developed a cult following at the skate events, and after a few years had built up a comfortable $13 million-a-year business.

Companies can continue at that level indefinitely, in a state of low-level equilibrium, serving a small but loyal audience. But the owners of Airwalk wanted more. They wanted to build themselves into an international brand, and in the early 1990s they changed course. They reorganized their business operations. They redesigned their shoes. They expanded their focus to include not just skateboarding but also surfing, snowboarding, mountain biking, and bicycle racing, sponsoring riders in all of those sports and making Airwalk synonymous with the active, alternative lifestyle. They embarked on an aggressive grassroots campaign to meet the buyers for youth-oriented shoe stores. They persuaded Foot Locker to try them out on an experimental basis. They worked to get alternative rock bands to wear their shoes on stage and, perhaps most important, they decided to hire a small advertising agency named Lambesis to rethink their marketing campaign. Under Lambesis's direction, Airwalk exploded. In 1993, it had been a $16 million company. In 1994, it had sales of $44 million. In 1995, sales jumped to $150 million, and the year after that they hit $175 million. At its peak, Airwalk was ranked by one major marketing research company as the thirteenth "coolest" brand among teenagers in the world, and the number three footwear brand, behind Nike and Adidas. Somehow, within the space of a year or two, Airwalk was jolted out of its quiet equilibrium on the beaches of southern California, in the mid-1990s, Airwalk tipped.

The Tipping Point has been concerned so far with defining epidemics and explaining the principles of epidemic transmission. The experiences of Paul Revere and Sesame Street and crime in New York City and Gore Associates each illustrate one of the rules of Tipping Points. In everyday life, however, the problems and situations we face don't always embody the principles of epidemics so neatly. In this section of the book, I'd like to look at less straightforward problems, and see how the idea of Mavens and Connectors and Stickiness and Context — either singly or in combination — helps to explain them.

Why, for example, did Airwalk tip? The short answer is that Lambesis came up with an inspired advertising campaign. At the start, working with only a small budget, the creative director of Lambesis, Chad Farmer, came up with a series of dramatic images — single photographs showing the Airwalk user relating to his shoes in some weird way. In one, a young man is wearing an Airwalk shoe on his head, with the laces hanging down like braids, as his laces are being cut by a barber. In another, a leather-clad girl is holding up a shiny vinyl Airwalk shoe like a mirror and using it to apply lipstick. The ads were put on billboards and in "wild postings" on construction-site walls and in alternative magazines. As Airwalk grew, Lambesis went into television. In one of the early Airwalk commercials, the camera pans across a bedroom floor littered with discarded clothing. It then settles under the bed, as the air is filled with grunting and puffing and noise of the bedsprings going up and down. Finally the camera comes out from under the bed and we see a young, slightly dazed-looking youth, holding an Airwalk shoe in his hand, jumping up and down on his bed as he tries unsuccessfully to kill a spider on the ceiling. The ads were entirely visual, designed to appeal to youth all over the world. They were rich in detail and visually arresting. They all featured a truculent, slightly geeky anti-hero. And they were funny, in a sophisticated way. This was great advertising; in the years since the first Airwalk ads appeared, the look and feel of that campaign has been copied again and again by other companies trying to be "cool." The strength of the Lambesis campaign was in more than the look of their work, though. Airwalk tipped because its advertising was founded very explicitly on the principles of epidemic transmission.

Perhaps the best way to understand what Lambesis did is to go back to what sociologists call the diffusion model, which is a detailed, academic way of looking at how a contagious idea or product or innovation moves through a population. One of the most famous diffusion studies is Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross's analysis of the spread of hybrid seed corn in Greene County, Iowa, in the 1930s. The new corn seed was introduced in Iowa in 1928, and it was superior in every respect to the seed that had been used by farmers for decades before. But it wasn't adopted all at once. Of the 259 farmers studied by Ryan and Gross, only a handful had started planting the new seed by 1932 and 1933. In 1934, 16 took the plunge. In 1935, 21 followed, then 36, and the year after that a whopping 61 and then 46, 36, 14, and 3, until by 1941, all but two of the 259 farmers studied were using the new seeds. In the language of diffusion research, the handful of farmers who started trying hybrid seed at the very beginning of the 1930s were the Innovators, the adventurous ones. The slightly larger group who were infected by them was the Early Adopters. They were the opinion leaders in the community, the respected, thoughtful people who watched and analyzed what those wild Innovators were doing and then followed suit. Then came the big bulge of farmers in 1936, 1937, and 1938, the Early Majority and the Late Majority, the deliberate and the skeptical mass, who would never try anything until the most respected of farmers had tried it first. They caught the seed virus and passed it on, finally, to the Laggards, the most traditional of all, who see no urgent reason to change. If you plot that progression on a graph, it forms a perfect epidemic curve — starting slowly, tipping just as the Early Adopters start using the seed, then rising sharply as the Majority catches on, and tailing away at the end when the Laggards come straggling in.

The message here — new seeds — were highly contagious and powerfully sticky. A farmer, after all, could see with his own eyes, from spring planting to fall harvest, how much better the new seeds were than the old. It's hard to imagine how that particular innovation couldn't have tipped. But in many cases the contagious spread of a new idea is actually quite tricky.

The business consultant Geoffrey Moore, for example, uses the example of high technology to argue that there is a substantial difference between the people who originate trends and ideas and the people in the Majority who eventually take them up. These two groups may be next to each other on the word-of-mouth continuum. But they don't communicate particularly well. The first two groups — the Innovators and Early Adopters — are visionaries. They want revolutionary change, something that sets them apart qualitatively from their competitors. They are the people who buy brand-new technology, before it's been perfected or proved or before the price has come down. They have small companies. They are just starting out. They are willing to take enormous risks. The Early Majority, by contrast, are big companies. They have to worry about any change fitting into their complex arrangement of suppliers and distributors. "If the goal of visionaries is to make a quantum leap forward, the goal of pragmatists is to make a percentage improvement — incremental, measurable, predictable progress," Moore writes. "It they are installing a new product, they want to know how other people have fared with it. The word risk is a negative word in their vocabulary — it does not connote opportunity or excitement but rather the chance to waste money and time. They will undertake risks when required, but they first will put in place safety nets and manage the risks very closely."