Popularity, Marketing, Influencers, the Tippping Point, Gladwell, and Watts
Popularity is a provocative topic, and is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a topic of interest to businesses. Especially to businesses’ marketing departments, as they strive to make their company’s products desirable. After all, a popular product is probably a profitable product.
According to the More than Branding article, “The Evolution of Marketing” marketing has been around as long as people have had things to sell. A good benchmark, and the beginning of what many would consider traditional marketing, would be the invention of print in ~1440. Then magazines, billboards, radio, and TV… The most revolutionary of these inventions were the radio and TV, which changed the way advertisers engaged with consumers. Following radio and TV came the internet and social media, and these quickly became a central focus of advertising efforts.
Of particular interest to us as a class, though, is the rise of “influencer marketing,” which very much coincides with the rise of social media. A quick definition of influencer marketing, from tapinfluence, is: “a type of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market.” The article from tapinfluence goes on to talk about how influencer marketing goes hand in hand with social-media marketing because influencers (people paid to personally market a product) are expected to spread the word about the product through personal social media accounts. They hope to take advantage of the idea that we have been discussing in class–using your social network to get people to join in adopting a product. The more people that join, the more people that will adopt, especially if there are direct benefits to using the product.
Interesting final note: An important idea we’ve been discussing with regards to this phenomenon is the tipping point. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book entitled The Tipping Point in which he claimed that anything that got past this point, largely thanks to influencers from the influencer marketing strategy, was bound to become a hit. The article called “Why Marketers Love Malcolm Gladwell So Much” discusses how Gladwell addresses this particular aspect of network analysis, and compares him to Watts–that’s right, the Watts from our textbook, who is apparently also a Cornell grad (woohoo!). The main difference between Gladwell and Watts are that Gladwell emphasizes pithiness over accuracy while Watts (a true academic) emphasizes accuracy over catchiness. In particular, Gladwell discusses the Law of Few, which is referring to influencers. However, the article points out that a law is universally true while Law of Few is certainly not, as we have learned in class and as Watts’ research accurately reflects.
https://www.tapinfluence.com/blog-what-is-influencer-marketing/
http://morethanbranding.com/2012/04/30/the-evolution-of-marketing/