The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
A summary of Gladwell's bestseller that created a marketing cult.
4 min readFeb 1, 2014
The Tipping Point is an ambitious book that explores how ideas spread and why some messages are more contagious than others. Filled with scores of examples, Gladwell focuses on the inflexion point of where an idea translates into a mass epidemic.
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
The Big Idea
Gladwell seeks to explain how ideas can be passed like viruses, how ideas reach a 'tipping point' when many people start adopting them and how this exponential growth of these ideas often takes us by surprise.
He starts by asking these two simple questions:
- Why some trends achieve exponential popularity while others fade into oblivion?
- What can we do to deliberately start and control positive trends of our own?
