Viewpoint - Business lesson can be learned from SARS, other epidemics

By Greg Conderacci

Let's say you had a big piece of paper and you folded it, not once or twice, but 50 times. How thick would the stack be? A foot? Ten feet?

The answer -- believe it or not -- is approximately the distance from the earth to the sun. The reason is that, in folding the paper, you are dealing with geometric progressions and geometric progressions grow, well, geometrically. Because epidemics spread that way, it's one reason for all the concern about SARS, even though there are relatively few cases of it in the world.

In his excellent book, The Tipping Point, How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell uses the paper example - and the problem of epidemics - to raise an interesting question. If we can understand how epidemics work, can we harness that same power to market products and services more effectively?

Gladwell believes that it is possible to do just that and gives many examples of it in his book. We've all seen it happen. Sometimes fads "catch on" and spread like wildfire, even with little or no advertising or other promotion beyond "word of mouth." The "viral" idea is passed from person to person - just like an epidemic.

To make the magic work, Gladwell says, you need a few ingredients:

• Mavens - credible collectors of information; people who other people see as experts;
• Salesmen - not necessarily salesmen per se, these people are so passionate about an idea or product that they are virtually irresistible;
• Connectors - the kind of people who know a lot of people; they occupy many different worlds, subcultures and niches simultaneously;
• The Stickiness Factor - a message so memorable that it can actually prompt people to take action.

The mavens start the epidemic, the salesmen bring emotion to the message, and the connectors spread it. We all know people like those in the first three categories - you may even be one of them. In marketing, it pays to concentrate your efforts on these people, Galdwell says.

No fooling.

So then the sticky message becomes the tricky part. Obviously, big companies spend millions developing "sticky messages" - those ideas that rapidly become hard-wired into our brains. For example, if you say "Winston tastes good," almost every American over the age of 40 knows "like a cigarette should" completes the sentence.

"There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible," Gladwell says. "All you have to do is find it."

While that is easier said than done, it is not impossible - even for a small company or firm. The first step is to have a message that describes your organization, something relatively few smaller professional organizations have. But it's not likely that you're going to start a successful epidemic without one. After all, what would the connectors, mavens and salesmen say?