Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

SIX
Case Study
RUMORS, SNEAKERS, AND THE POWER OF TRANSLATION

Airwalking is the name given to the skateboarding move in which the skater takes off from a ramp, slips his board out from under his feet, and then takes one or two long, exaggerated strides in the air before landing. It is a classic stunt, a staple of traditional skateboarding, which is why when two entrepreneurs decided in the mid-1980s to start manufacturing athletic shoes aimed at hard-core skateboarders, they called the company Airwalk. Airwalk was based outside San Diego and rooted in the teenage beach-and-skate culture of the region. In the beginning, the firm made a canvas shoe in wild colors and prints that became a kind of alternative fashion statement. They also made a technical skate shoe in suede, with a thick sole and a heavily-cushioned upper that — at least at first — was almost as stiff as the skateboard itself. But the skaters became so devoted to the product that they would wash the shoes over and again, then drive over them in cars to break them in. Airwalk was cool. It sponsored professional skateboarders, and developed a cult following at the skate events, and after a few years had built up a comfortable $13 million-a-year business.

Companies can continue at that level indefinitely, in a state of low-level equilibrium, serving a small but loyal audience. But the owners of Airwalk wanted more. They wanted to build themselves into an international brand, and in the early 1990s they changed course. They reorganized their business operations. They redesigned their shoes. They expanded their focus to include not just skateboarding but also surfing, snowboarding, mountain biking, and bicycle racing, sponsoring riders in all of those sports and making Airwalk synonymous with the active, alternative lifestyle. They embarked on an aggressive grassroots campaign to meet the buyers for youth-oriented shoe stores. They persuaded Foot Locker to try them out on an experimental basis. They worked to get alternative rock bands to wear their shoes on stage and, perhaps most important, they decided to hire a small advertising agency named Lambesis to rethink their marketing campaign. Under Lambesis's direction, Airwalk exploded. In 1993, it had been a $16 million company. In 1994, it had sales of $44 million. In 1995, sales jumped to $150 million, and the year after that they hit $175 million. At its peak, Airwalk was ranked by one major marketing research company as the thirteenth "coolest" brand among teenagers in the world, and the number three footwear brand, behind Nike and Adidas. Somehow, within the space of a year or two, Airwalk was jolted out of its quiet equilibrium on the beaches of southern California, in the mid-1990s, Airwalk tipped.

The Tipping Point has been concerned so far with defining epidemics and explaining the principles of epidemic transmission. The experiences of Paul Revere and Sesame Street and crime in New York City and Gore Associates each illustrate one of the rules of Tipping Points. In everyday life, however, the problems and situations we face don't always embody the principles of epidemics so neatly. In this section of the book, I'd like to look at less straightforward problems, and see how the idea of Mavens and Connectors and Stickiness and Context — either singly or in combination — helps to explain them.

Why, for example, did Airwalk tip? The short answer is that Lambesis came up with an inspired advertising campaign. At the start, working with only a small budget, the creative director of Lambesis, Chad Farmer, came up with a series of dramatic images — single photographs showing the Airwalk user relating to his shoes in some weird way. In one, a young man is wearing an Airwalk shoe on his head, with the laces hanging down like braids, as his laces are being cut by a barber. In another, a leather-clad girl is holding up a shiny vinyl Airwalk shoe like a mirror and using it to apply lipstick. The ads were put on billboards and in "wild postings" on construction-site walls and in alternative magazines. As Airwalk grew, Lambesis went into television. In one of the early Airwalk commercials, the camera pans across a bedroom floor littered with discarded clothing. It then settles under the bed, as the air is filled with grunting and puffing and noise of the bedsprings going up and down. Finally the camera comes out from under the bed and we see a young, slightly dazed-looking youth, holding an Airwalk shoe in his hand, jumping up and down on his bed as he tries unsuccessfully to kill a spider on the ceiling. The ads were entirely visual, designed to appeal to youth all over the world. They were rich in detail and visually arresting. They all featured a truculent, slightly geeky anti-hero. And they were funny, in a sophisticated way. This was great advertising; in the years since the first Airwalk ads appeared, the look and feel of that campaign has been copied again and again by other companies trying to be "cool." The strength of the Lambesis campaign was in more than the look of their work, though. Airwalk tipped because its advertising was founded very explicitly on the principles of epidemic transmission.

Perhaps the best way to understand what Lambesis did is to go back to what sociologists call the diffusion model, which is a detailed, academic way of looking at how a contagious idea or product or innovation moves through a population. One of the most famous diffusion studies is Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross's analysis of the spread of hybrid seed corn in Greene County, Iowa, in the 1930s. The new corn seed was introduced in Iowa in 1928, and it was superior in every respect to the seed that had been used by farmers for decades before. But it wasn't adopted all at once. Of the 259 farmers studied by Ryan and Gross, only a handful had started planting the new seed by 1932 and 1933. In 1934, 16 took the plunge. In 1935, 21 followed, then 36, and the year after that a whopping 61 and then 46, 36, 14, and 3, until by 1941, all but two of the 259 farmers studied were using the new seeds. In the language of diffusion research, the handful of farmers who started trying hybrid seed at the very beginning of the 1930s were the Innovators, the adventurous ones. The slightly larger group who were infected by them was the Early Adopters. They were the opinion leaders in the community, the respected, thoughtful people who watched and analyzed what those wild Innovators were doing and then followed suit. Then came the big bulge of farmers in 1936, 1937, and 1938, the Early Majority and the Late Majority, the deliberate and the skeptical mass, who would never try anything until the most respected of farmers had tried it first. They caught the seed virus and passed it on, finally, to the Laggards, the most traditional of all, who see no urgent reason to change. If you plot that progression on a graph, it forms a perfect epidemic curve — starting slowly, tipping just as the Early Adopters start using the seed, then rising sharply as the Majority catches on, and tailing away at the end when the Laggards come straggling in.

The message here — new seeds — were highly contagious and powerfully sticky. A farmer, after all, could see with his own eyes, from spring planting to fall harvest, how much better the new seeds were than the old. It's hard to imagine how that particular innovation couldn't have tipped. But in many cases the contagious spread of a new idea is actually quite tricky.

The business consultant Geoffrey Moore, for example, uses the example of high technology to argue that there is a substantial difference between the people who originate trends and ideas and the people in the Majority who eventually take them up. These two groups may be next to each other on the word-of-mouth continuum. But they don't communicate particularly well. The first two groups — the Innovators and Early Adopters — are visionaries. They want revolutionary change, something that sets them apart qualitatively from their competitors. They are the people who buy brand-new technology, before it's been perfected or proved or before the price has come down. They have small companies. They are just starting out. They are willing to take enormous risks. The Early Majority, by contrast, are big companies. They have to worry about any change fitting into their complex arrangement of suppliers and distributors. "If the goal of visionaries is to make a quantum leap forward, the goal of pragmatists is to make a percentage improvement — incremental, measurable, predictable progress," Moore writes. "It they are installing a new product, they want to know how other people have fared with it. The word risk is a negative word in their vocabulary — it does not connote opportunity or excitement but rather the chance to waste money and time. They will undertake risks when required, but they first will put in place safety nets and manage the risks very closely."

Moore's argument is that the attitude of the Early Adopters and the attitude of the Early Majority are fundamentally incompatible. Innovations don't just slide effortlessly from one group to the next. There is a chasm between them. All kinds of high-tech products fail, never making it beyond the Early Adopters, because the companies that make them can't find a way to transform an idea that makes perfect sense to an Early Adopter into one that makes perfect sense to a member of the Early Majority.

Moore's book is entirely concerned with high technology. But there's no question that his arguments apply to other kind of social epidemics as well. In the case of Hush Puppies, the downtown Manhattan kids who rediscovered the brand were wearing the shoes because Hush Puppies were identified with a dated, kitschy, fifties image. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. What they were looking for in fashion was a revolutionary statement. They were willing to take risks in order to set themselves apart. But most of us in the Early and Late Majority don't want to make a revolutionary statement or take risks with fashion at all. How did Hush Puppies cross the chasm from one group to the next? Lambesis was given a shoe that had a very specific appeal to the southern California skateboarding subculture. Their task was to make it hip and attractive to teenagers all over the world — even teens who had never skateboarded in their life, who didn't think skateboarding was particularly cool, and who had no functional need for wide outsoles that could easily grip the board and padded uppers to cushion the shocks of doing aerial stunts. That's clearly not an easy task either. How did they do it? How is it that all the weird, idiosyncratic things that really cool kids do end up in the mainstream?

This is where, I think, Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen play their most important role. In the chapter on the Law of the Few, I talked about how their special social gifts can cause epidemics to tip. Here, though, it is possible to be much more specific about what they do. They are the ones who make it possible for innovations to overcome this problem of the chasm. They are translators: they take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand. Mark Alpert, the University of Texas professor whom I described as the Ur-Maven, is the kind of person who would come over to your house and show you how to install or fix or manipulate a very complicated piece of software. Tom Gau, the quintessential Salesman, takes the very arcane field of tax law and retirement planning and repackages it in terms that make emotional sense to his clients. Lois Weisberg, the Connector, belongs to many different worlds — politics, drama, environmentalism, music, law, medicine, and on and on — and one of the key things she does is to play the intermediary between different social worlds. One of the key figures at Lambesis was DeeDee Gordon, the firm's former head of market research, and she says that the same process occurs in the case of the fashion trends that periodically sweep through youth culture. The Innovators try something new. Then someone — the teen equivalent of a Maven or a Connector or a Salesman — sees it and adopts it. "Those kids make things more palatable for mainstream people. They see what the really wired kids are doing and they tweak it. They start doing it themselves, but they change it a bit. They make it more usable. Maybe there's a kid who rolls up his jeans and puts duct tape around the bottom because he's the one bike messenger in the school. Well, the translators like that look. But they won't use tape. They'll buy something with Velcro. Or then there was the whole baby-doll T-shirt thing. One girl starts wearing a shrunken-down T-shirt. She goes to Toys R Us and buys the Barbie T-shirt. And the others say, that's so cool. But they might not get it so small, and they might not get it with Barbie on it. They look at it and say, it's a little off. But there's a way I can change it and make it okay. Then it takes off."

Perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of this process of translation comes from the study of rumors, which are — obviously — the most contagious of all social messages. In his book The Psychology of Rumor, the sociologist Gordon Allport writes of a rumor involving a Chinese teacher who was traveling through Maine on vacation in the summer of 1945, shortly before Japan's surrender to the Allies at the end of World War II. The teacher was carrying a guidebook, which said that a splendid view of the surrounding countryside could be seen from a certain local hilltop, and he stopped in a small town to ask directions. From that innocent request, a rumor quickly spread: a Japanese spy had gone up the hill to take pictures of the region. "The simple, unadorned facts that constitute the 'kernel of truth' in this rumor," Allport writes, "were from the outset distorted in… three directions." First of all the story was leveled. All kinds of details that are essential for understanding the true meaning of the incident were left out. There was no mention, Allport points out, of "the courteous and timid approach of the visitor to the native of whom he inquired his way; the fact that the visitor's precise nationality was unknown… the fact that the visitor had allowed himself to be readily identified by people along the way." Then the story was sharpened. The details that remained were made more specific. A man became a spy. Someone who looked Asian became Japanese. Sightseeing became espionage. The guidebook in the teacher's hand became a camera. Finally, a process of assimilation took place: the story was changed so it made more sense to those spreading the rumor. "A Chinese teacher on a holiday was a concept that could not arise in the minds of most farmers, for they did not know that some American universities employ Chinese scholars on their staffs and that these scholars, like other teachers, are entitled to summer holidays." Allport writes. "The novel situation was perforce assimilated in terms of the most available frames of reference." And what were those frames of reference? In 1945, in rural Maine, at a time when virtually every family had a son or relative involved in the war effort, the only way to make sense of a story like that was to fit it into the context of the war. Thus did Asian become Japanese, guidebook become camera, and sightseeing become espionage.

Psychologists have found that this process of distortion is nearly universal in the spread of rumors. Memory experiments have been done in which subjects are given a story to read or a picture to look at and then asked to return, at intervals of several months, and reproduce what they had been shown. Invariably, significant leveling occurs. All but a few details are dropped. But certain details are also, simultaneously, sharpened. In one classic example, subjects were given a drawing of a hexagon bisected by three lines with seven equal-size circles superimposed on top of it. What one typical subject remembered, several months later, was a square bisected by two lines with 38 small circles arrayed around the fringes of the diagram. "There was a marked tendency for any picture or story to gravitate in memory toward what was familiar to the subject in his own life, consonant with his own culture, and above all, to what had some special emotional significance for him," Allport writes. "In their effort after meaning, the subjects would condense or fill in so as to achieve a better 'Gestalt,' a better closure — a simpler, more significant configuration."

This is what is meant by translation. What Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning. If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then — whether it is of shoes or behavior or a piece of software — he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.

There is a wonderful example of this strategy in action in Baltimore, the city whose problems with drugs and disease I talked about earlier in the book. In Baltimore, as in many communities with a lot of drug addicts, the city sends out a van stocked with thousands of clean syringes to certain street corners in its inner-city neighborhoods at certain times in the week. The idea is that for every dirty, used needle that addicts hand over, they can get a free clean needle in return. In principle, needle exchange sounds like a good way to fight AIDS, since the reuse of old HIV-infected needles is responsible for so much of the virus's spread. But, at least on first examination, it seems to have some obvious limitations. Addicts, for one, aren't the most organized and reliable of people. So what guarantee is there that they are going to be able to regularly meet up with the needle van? Second, most heroin addicts go through about one needle a day, shooting up at least five or six times — if not more — until the tip of the syringe becomes so blunt that it is useless. That's a lot of needles. How can a van, coming by once a week, serve the needs of addicts who are shooting up around the clock? What if the van comes by on Tuesday, and by Saturday night an addict has run out?

To analyze how well the needle program was working, researchers at Johns Hopkins University began, in the mid-1990s, to ride along with the vans in order to talk to the people handing in needles. What they found surprised them. They had assumed that addicts brought in their own dirty needles for exchange, that is drug users got new needles the way that you or I buy milk: going to the store when it is open and picking up enough for the week. But what they found was that a handful of addicts were coming by each week with knapsacks bulging with 300 or 400 dirty needles at a time, which is obviously far more than they were using themselves. These men were then going back to the street and selling the clean needles for one dollar each. The van, in other words, was a kind of syringe wholesaler. The real retailers were these handfuls of men — these super-exchangers — who were prowling around the streets and shooting galleries, picking up dirty needles, and then making a modest living on the clean needles they received in exchange. At first, some of the program's coordinators had second thoughts. Did they really want taxpayer-funded needles financing the habits of addicts? But then they realized that they had stumbled inadvertently into a solution to the limitations of needle exchange programs. "It's a much, much better system," says Tom Valente, who teaches in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. "A lot of people shoot on Friday and Saturday night, and they don't necessarily think in a rational way that they need to have clean tools before they go out. The needle exchange program isn't going to be available at that time — and certainly not in the shooting galleries. But these [super-exchangers] can be there at times when people are doing drugs and when they need clean syringes. They provide twenty-four seven service, and it doesn't cost us anything."

One of the researchers who rode with the needle vans was an epidemiologist by the name of Tom Junge. He would flag down the super-exchangers and interview them. His conclusion is that they represent a very distinct and special group. "They are all very well connected people," Junge says. "They know Baltimore inside and out. They know where to go to get any kind of drug and any kind of needle. They have street savvy. I would say that they are unusually socially connected. They have a lot of contacts I would have to say the underlying motive is financial or economic. But there is definitely an interest in helping people out."

Does this sound familiar? The super-exchangers are the Connectors of Baltimore's drug world. What people at Johns Hopkins would like to do is use the super-exchangers to start a counter-drug epidemic. What if they took those same savvy, socially connected, altruistic people and gave them condoms to hand out, or educated them in the kinds of health information that drug addicts desperately need to know? Those super-exchangers sound as though they have the skills to bridge the chasm between the medical community and the majority of drug users, who are hopelessly isolated from the information and institutions that could save their lives. They sound as if they have the ability to translate the language and ideas of health promotion into a form that other addicts could understand.

Lambesis's intention was to perform this very same service for Airwalk. Obviously, they couldn't directly identify the equivalent of Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen to spread the word about Airwalk. They were a tiny ad agency trying to put together an international campaign. What they could do, though, was start an epidemic in which their own ad campaign played the role of translator, serving as an intermediary between the Innovators and everyone else. If they did their homework right, they realized, they could be the ones to level and sharpen and assimilate the cutting-edge ideas of youth culture and make them acceptable for the Majority. They could play the role of Connector, Maven, and Salesman.

The first thing Lambesis did was to develop an in-house market research program, aimed at the youth market that Airwalk wanted to conquer. If they were going to translate Innovator ideas for the mainstream, they first had to find out what those Innovator ideas were. To run their research division, Lambesis hired DeeDee Gordon, who had previously worked for the Converse athletic shoe company. Gordon is a striking woman, with a languid wit, who lives in a right-angled, shag-rugged, white-stuccoed modernist masterpiece in the Hollywood Hills, midway between Madonna's old house and Aldous Huxley's old house. Her tastes are almost impossibly eclectic: depending on the day of the week, she might be obsessed with an obscure hip-hop band, or an old Peter Sellers movie, or a new Japanese electronic gadget, or a certain shade of white that she has suddenly, mysteriously, decided is very cool. While she was at Converse Gordon noticed white teenage girls in Los Angeles dressing up like Mexican gangsters with the look they called "the wife beater" — a tight white tank top with the bra straps showing — and long shorts and tube socks and shower sandals. "I told them, this is going to hit," Gordon remembers. "There are just too many people wearing it. We have to make a shower sandal." So they cut the back off a Converse sneaker, put a sandal outsole on it, and Converse sold half a million pairs — Gordon has a sixth sense of what neighborhoods or bars or clubs to go to in London or Tokyo or Berlin to find out what the latest looks and fashion are. She sometimes comes to New York and sits watching the sidewalks of Soho and the Last Village for hours, photographing anything unusual. Gordon is a Maven — a Maven for the elusive, indefinable quality known as cool.

At Lambesis, Gordon developed a network of young, savvy correspondents in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and Dallas and Seattle and around the world in places like Tokyo and London. These were the kind of people who would have been wearing Hush Puppies in the East Village in the early 1990s. They all fit a particular personality type: they were Innovators.

"These are kids who are outcasts in some way," Gordon says. "It doesn't matter whether it's actually true. They feel that way. They always felt like they were different. If you ask kids what worries them, the trendsetter kids pick up on things like germ warfare, or terrorism. They pick up on bigger-picture things, whereas the mainstream kids think about being overweight, or their grandparents dying, or how well they are doing in school. You see more activists in trendsetters. People with more passion. I'm looking for somebody who is an individual, who has definitely set herself apart from everybody else, who doesn't look like their peers."

Gordon has a kind of relentless curiosity about the world. "I've run into trendsetters who look completely Joe Regular Guy," she went on. "I can see Joe Regular Guy at a club listening to some totally hard-core band playing, and I say to myself, ohmigod, what's that guy doing here, and that totally intrigues me, and I have to walk up to him and say, hey, you're really into this band. What's up? You know what I mean? I look at everything. If I see Joe Regular Guy sitting in a coffee shop and everyone around him has blue hair, I'm going to gravitate toward him because, hey, what's Joe Regular Guy doing in a coffee shop with people with blue hair?"

With her stable of Innovator correspondents in place, Gordon would then go back to them two or three or four times a year, asking them what music they were listening to, what television shows they were watching, what clothes they were buying, or what their goals and aspirations were. The data were not always coherent. They required interpretation. Different ideas would pop up in different parts of the country, then sometimes move east to west or sometimes west to east. But by looking at the big picture, by comparing the data from Austin to Seattle and Seattle to Los Angeles and Los Angeles to New York, and watching it change from one month to the next, Gordon was able to develop a picture of the rise and movement of new trends across the country. And by comparing what her Innovators were saying and doing with what mainstream kids were saying and doing three months or six months or a year later, she was able to track what sorts of ideas were able to make the jump from the cool subcultures to the Majority.

"Take the whole men-wearing-makeup, the Kurt Cobain, androgynous thing," Gordon said. "You know how he used to paint his fingernails with Magic Marker? We saw that in the Northwest first, then trickling through Los Angeles and New York and Austin because they have a hip music scene. Then it trickled into other parts of the country. That took a long time to go mainstream."

Gordon's findings became the template for the Airwalk campaign. If she found new trends or ideas or concepts that were catching fire among Innovators around the country, the firm would plant those same concepts in the Airwalk ads they were creating. Once, for example, Gordon picked up on the fact that trendsetters were developing a sudden interest in Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The influential rap band Beastie Boys were very publicly putting money into the Free Tibet campaign, and were bringing monks on stage at their concerts to give testimonials. "The Beastie Boys pushed that through and made it okay," Gordon remembers. So Lambesis made a very funny Airwalk ad with a young Airwalk-wearing monk sitting at a desk in a classroom writing a test. He's looking down at his feet because he's written cheat notes on the side of his shoes. (When a billboard version of the ad was put up in San Francisco, Lambesis was forced to take it down, after Tibetan monks protested that monks don't touch their feet, let alone cheat on tests.) When James Bond started popping up on the trendsetter radar, Lambesis hired the director of the James Bond movies to film a series of commercials, all of which featured Airwalk-clad characters making wild escapes from faceless villains. When trendsetters started to show an ironic interest in country club culture, and began wearing old Fred Perry and Izod golf shirts, Airwalk made a shoe out of tennis ball material and Lambesis made a print ad of the shoe being thrown up in the air and hit with a tennis racket. "One time we noticed that the future technology thing was really big," Gordon says. "You'd ask some kid what they would invent, if they could invent anything they wanted, and it was always about effortless living. You know, put your head in a bubble, push a button, and it comes out perfect. So we got Airwalk to do these rounded, bubbly outsoles for the shoes. We started mixing materials — meshes and breathable materials and special types of Gore-Tex and laying them on top of each other." To took through the inventory of Airwalk ads in that critical period, in fact, is to get a complete guide to the fads and infatuations and interests of the youth culture of the era: there are 30-second spoofs of kung fu movies, a TV spot on Beat poetry, an X-files-style commercial in which a young man driving into Roswell, New Mexico, has his Airwalks confiscated by aliens.

There are two explanations for why this strategy was so successful. The first is obvious. Lambesis was picking on various, very contagious, trends while they were still in their infancy. By the time their new ad campaign and the shoes to go along with it were ready, that trend (with luck) would just be hitting the mainstream. Lambesis, in other words, was piggy-backing on social epidemics, associating Airwalk with each new trend wave that swept through youth culture. "It's all about timing," Gordon says. "You follow the trendsetters. You see what they are doing. It takes a year to produce those shoes. By the time the year goes, if your trend is the right trend, it's going to hit those mainstream people at the right time. So if you see future technology as a trend — if you see enough trendsetters in enough cities buying things that are ergonomic in design, or shoes that are jacked up, or little Palm Pilots, and when you ask them to invent something, they're all talking about flying cars of the future — that's going to lead you to believe that within six months to a year everyone and his grandmother will be into the same thing."

Lambesis wasn't just a passive observer in this process, however. It is also the case that their ads helped to tip the ideas they were discovering among Innovators. Gordon says, for example, that when something fails to make it out of the trendsetter community into the mainstream, it's usually because the idea doesn't root itself broadly enough in the culture: "There aren't enough cues. You didn't see it in music and film and art and fashion. Usually, if something's going to make it, you'll see that thread running throughout everything — through what they like on TV, what they want to invent, what they want to listen to, even the materials they want to wear. It's everywhere. But if something doesn't make it, you'll only see it in one of those areas." Lambesis was taking certain ideas, and planting them everywhere. And as they planted them, they provided that critical translation. Gordon's research showed that Innovator kids were heavily into the Dalai Lama and all of the very serious issues raised by the occupation of Tibet. So Lambesis took one very simple reference to that — a Tibetan monk — and put him in a funny, slightly cheeky situation. They tweaked it. The Innovators had a heavily ironic interest in country club culture. Lambesis lightened that. They made the shoe into a tennis ball, and that made the reference less arch and funnier. Innovators were into kung fu movies. So Lambesis made a kung fu parody ad in which the Airwalk hero fights off martial arts villains with his skateboard. Lambesis took the kung fu motif and merged it with youth culture. In the case of the Chinese scholar's vacation, according to Allport, the facts of the situation didn't make sense to the people of the town; so they came up with an interpretation that did make sense — that the scholar was a spy — and, to make that new interpretation work, "discordant details were leveled out, incidents were sharpened to fit the chosen theme, and the episode as a whole was assimilated to the preexisting structure of feeling and thought characteristic of the members of the group among whom the rumor spread." That's just what Lambesis did. They took the cultural cues from the Innovators — cues that the mainstream kids may have seen but not been able to make sense of — and leveled, sharpened, and assimilated them into a more coherent form. They gave those cues a specific meaning that they did not have previously and packaged that new sensibility in the form of a pair of shoes. It can hardly be a surprise that the Airwalk rumor spread so quickly in 1995 and 1996.

The Airwalk epidemic did not last. In 1997, the company's sales began to falter. The firm had production problems and difficulty filling their orders. In critical locations, Airwalk failed to supply enough products for the back-to-school season, and its once loyal distributors began to turn against it. At the same time, the company began to lose that cutting-edge sensibility that it had traded on for so long. "When Airwalk started, the product was directional and inventive. The shoes were very forward," said Chad Farmer. "We maintained the trendsetter focus on the marketing. But the product began to slip. The company began to listen more and more to the sales staff and the product started to get that homogenized, mainstream look. Everybody loved the marketing. In focus groups that we do, they still talk about how they miss it. But the number one complaint is what happened to the cool product?" Lambesis's strategy was based on translating Innovator shoes for the Majority. But suddenly Airwalk wasn't an Innovator shoe anymore. "We made another, critical mistake," Lee Smith, the former president of Airwalk says. "We had a segmentation strategy, where the small, independent core skate shops — the three hundred boutiques around the country that really created us — had a certain product line that was exclusive to them. They didn't want us to be in the mall. So what we did was we segmented our product. We said to the core shops, you don't have to compete with the malls. It worked out very well." The boutiques were given the technical shoes: different designs, better materials, more padding, different cushioning systems, different rubber compounds, more expensive uppers. "We had a special signature model — the Tony Hawk — for skateboarding, which was a lot beefier and more durable. It would retail for about eighty dollars." The shoes Airwalk distributed to Kinney's or Champ's or Foot Locker, meanwhile, were less elaborate and would retail for about $60. The Innovators always got to wear a different, more exclusive shoe than everyone else. The mainstream customer had the satisfaction of wearing the same brand as the cool kids.

But then, at the height of its success, Airwalk switched strategies. The company stopped giving the specialty shops their own shoes. "That's when the trendsetters started to get a disregard for the brand," says Farmer. "They started to go to their boutiques where they got their cool stuff, and they realized that everyone else could get the very same shoes at J C Penney." Now, all of a sudden, Lambesis was translating the language of mainstream products for the mainstream. The epidemic was over.

"My category manager once asked me what happened," Smith says, "and I told him, you ever see ForrestGump? Stupid is as stupid does. Well, cool is as cool does. Cool brands treat people well, and we didn't. I had personally promised some of those little shops that we would give them special product, then we changed our minds. That was the beginning. In that world, it all works on word of mouth. When we became bigger, that's when we should have paid more attention to the details and kept a good buzz going, so when people said you guys are sellouts, you guys went mainstream, you suck, we could have said, you know what, we don't. We had this little jewel of a brand, and little by little we sold that off into the mainstream, and once we had sold it all" — he paused — "so what? You buy a pair of our shoes. Why would you ever buy another?"