In Marketing, Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Suppose you had a large sheet of paper and you folded it over 50 times. When you were done, how high would the folded paper be? Two feet? Ten feet?

In his bestseller, The Tipping Point, How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, author Malcolm Gladwell gives the surprising answer: approximately the distance from the earth to the sun. Folding the paper yields a geometric progression. It's the way epidemics spread, which is why SARS is so scary. It's also the way good marketing can spread your ideas. The secret is making your concept viral so that it spreads like epidemics -- and fads. Gladwell gives several examples in his excellent book.