Fashion Marketing: Contemporary Issues, Second edition - Pr School

The making and marketing of a trend 305
banking on, however, was how areas of interest such as epidemiology or virology
would impact so profoundly on his other interests: why trends as in social
or fashion trends happen the way they happen, how movements or ideas run
through the culture the way they do.
We think, for instance, that they happen slowly, he says, and over a long
period of time, moving carefully and measurably through those categories
cool hunters or trend forecasters are so fond of using – from innovators,
to Early Adopters, to Early Majority, to Late Majority and finally onto the
Laggards – as each one of us takes it on when we are ready, familiar with the
shape of that shoe for instance, or comfortable with the textures and surfaces
of that chair or that house (Gladwell, 2000b).
But no, Gladwell, with his knowledge of virology, noted that the opposite
was the case. That ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread
just like viruses do. More bizarrely, he noticed that the spread corresponded to
characteristics found in all infections, that they were not slow to infect, but did
so rapidly and in strict geometric progression. More peculiarly, he observed
that it only took one or two people or carriers to spread the disease, and that
once this infection process began, it showed up as a dramatic and upward
curve. The point at which this curve hits critical mass has been named the
Tipping Point, the title of his book.
For Godin (2000a), it is a similar procedure. For him, in future all ideas and
fashion statements will be spread this way. His book is a perfect example of
this. Launched with no advertizing budget, it is a paradigm of that process;
you can download it from the Internet (at www.ideasvirus.com) and, when
you do, it tells you how the book can be spread like a virus via chatrooms,
e-mails to friends, by firestorming bulletin boards or by word of mouth (Godin,
2000b). This of course is how fashion and lifestyle trends can be spread most
effectively. All of which throws into doubt much of what we have always
believed about how trends spread, why they spread, and the part or otherwise
advertizing, the media and big budget marketing play in spreading them.
The latter not a lot, if you are to believe the central plank of Gladwell or
Godin’s thesis. Indeed, for both, word of mouth (viral marketing) is by far
the best way for trends or ideas to spread, and this happens best and most
effectively – not by TV, by advertizing (interruption marketing) or niche
advertizing as one would suspect – but via a network of people Gladwell calls
mavens, connectors and salesman, yes, by word of mouth.
These are a small but influential (his Law of the Few) group of men and
women who, because of their positions (connectors), the way they garner and
store information (mavens), or indeed disseminate such information in a way
that is more palatable to the slow to catch on majority (salesmen), are core
to the whole process of how tastes, trends and ideas are brokered or spread
to the rest of the population. Media Street Network, a successful US trends
consultancy and media marketing agency run by 23-year-old Reggie Styles,
does this by recruiting teams of teenagers from the street who will either tell
him what’s hot and what’s not, or if his company already has a hot trend,
product or music idea to promote, it will use these teenagers to connect with