Lots of people have questioned whether there is hard evidence to support the influencer theory described in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. I wrote about it here and here. One of the best-known critics is Duncan Watts, who was profiled in Fast Company
Brand Week's Todd Wasserman has a new article, Scientist: Influencer Theory is Bogus, covering an interview with Watts, who "first came to the marketing world's attention in 2003, when a New York Times article positioned the Columbia University professor as the anti-Malcolm Gladwell. While Gladwell's 2000 book The Tipping Point laid out an entertaining theory that fads like Hush Puppy shoes ...spread because of groups of people called influencers, Watts has argued that that model is deeply flawed. Watts, now a research scientist with Yahoo, charges that influencers have been poorly defined and that scientific data show you're just as likely to spread a message or product by targeting a random group of consumers as you would by going after so-called influencers. Mostly, Watts says marketers should be much more scientific in their approach, especially as social media grows in importance."
"Brandweek: What's wrong with the influencer model? Duncan Watts: ...when you scrutinize [the claims] carefully, they turn out to not really be very meaningful. Or to put it another way, everyone thinks they know what an influencer is and everyone thinks they know why they matter, but everybody thinks something different. Is an influencer the hipsters in the East Village or Oprah Winfrey? What makes Oprah influential is very different from what makes the hipster in the East Village influential. And so by failing to differentiate carefully between all these different types of influencers you really undermine the ability of the theory to say anything predictive.... Somebody asked the publisher of the surprise bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves why that book was so successful and he said it was successful because lots of people bought it. ...Hits are highly unpredictable. It's very difficult to even retrospectively go back and show that there are certain kinds of consistent attributes that result in being popular.
"[Brandweek]: So what would your advice be to a marketer trying to learn from
things like that? [Watts]: My first advice would be stop fooling yourself.... Marketers have been chasing influencers for a decade and they haven't found them. And the reason is not that influence doesn't matter. It may very well matter.... The reason is that history is a very poor guide to the future.
"...[T]he whole influencer theory is actually more of a rhetorical device than a theory. It's not like people actually have an explicit theory of who is influential and they go out there and they use that theory to decide who to target. It's more that they do whatever they do. They throw parties or they give away free samples or they advertise in particular publications that brand themselves as reaching an influential audience and run some campaign in their normal manner. And if it works, they say, 'We reached the influencers.' ...In that sense, it's just a rhetorical device to help you explain the randomness that you actually experience in the world.... So it's one of these impossible-to-falsify theories because who you identify as an influencer is always after the fact."
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