nickshanagher

“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped,” writes Malcolm Gladwell at the end of his breakthrough book, The Tipping Point . It is a great read for retailers who puzzle why their shoppers do one thing and politicians do another. Or why some marketing sticks and some sure fire products stall. Gladwell is a journalist who tells great stories. In this book he talks about the success of Airwalk when the west coast US footwear maker rose from sales of $16 m in 1993 to $175m in 1997. And then bombed… What went wrong? Gladwell interviewed former president Lee Smith. Airwalk made a critical mistake, he said. “We had a segmentation strategy where the small core skate shops – the 300 boutiques around the country who really created us – had a certain product line that was exclusive to them...” And then they stopped doing that… Smith was asked by his category manager what h...