After reading the title, I expect a lot of questions and a lot of answers to come up in your minds. The answers will majorly consist of praises for the epic song, some talking about the lyrics and the others talking about the singularity; while the most common question will be – what the hell is this article doing in a business journal? Well, all those presumptions will have to wait till the article finishes itself, after which they’ll themselves disappear into oblivion.
THE LAW OF EPIDEMIC is a theory suggested by a non-fiction writer called Malcolm Gladwell, in his book titled the tipping point. The tipping point is based on a simple idea, which says that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the rise and fall of crime waves, or, for that matter the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, the rise of any movie into a blockbuster or the sudden transformation of an inexplicably ordinary song like KOLAVERI DI into a rage, is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas, products, messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. It’s startling to know that behavior of majority of the population; due to a stuffed up routine, fast paced and complex life is getting predictable and quantifiable in mathematical equations. Does that mean we are turning into robots? Well, that won’t be completely wrong. Now, this page is not for philosopher’s lament; so I’ll share with you the business implications of this theory.
According to the tipping point, there are three rules of epidemics namely: THE LAW OF THE FEW, THE STICKINESS FACTOR and THE POWER OF CONTEXT.
THE LAW OF THE FEW: This law conveys the theory, that the spread of epidemics do not need a massive population or a superfluous amount of capital. They heavily rely on three kinds of ‘special’ people: Connectors, Mavens and the Salesmen. The connectors are the kind who know everybody and vice versa. They are the ones with connections in multiple dominions. Their mostly recognizable trait is that they have their feet on many boats, i.e. they are, or have been associated with more than one field of expertise. Mavens are the information mines; they are the ones who know a lot, about a lot. You’ll find very few of this creed around you, they are the ones whose advice you always follow; and the third kind consists of the salesmen. They are the ones who sell the world, to the world. Extremely high convincing ability, extraordinarily ‘different’ communication skills and hypnotics-seeming information delivery are the most common traits of a salesman. Well we’ll assume or we rather don’t have any other choice to believe that the makers of the song had an extremely efficient team of these three kinds of people. We already know that the composer DHANUSH is related to RAJNIKANT! Enough said.
THE STICKINESS FACTOR: is a complex to understand and complex to elucidate theory, though if you take out the juice, it means to convey that the product should have extremely carefully placed repetitions and ‘should move its target audience into action’. That’s exactly what the song did by the virtue of its out-of-the-box accent and a title which was in a language was alien to the major part of this world. Think of any massive success and you’ll find the stickiness factor in each of them. The lisping and stammering of Shahid Kapoor’s KAMINEY is another example that I can recall. This is the factor where producers consider their audiences as robots, and are proud of that. Extremely efficient surveys accompanied with thoroughly in-depth study of psychology preordains every possible consequence including people’s response. If you request, we’ll print many articulate examples gathered by rigorous research.
THE POWER OF CONTEXT: is the dominion that deals with answers of the questions like: when, where and how. According to this part of the theory, if you wish to make your product an epidemic, you ought to know: when to launch it, where to launch it and how to launch it. You’ve got to be, at the right place, at the right time. The makers of the song were lucky to be at the nick of the moment while launching it. It was a very brief period of time that lacked any major music success. The scenario had become stagnant for a brief moment of time…and boom! They launched it on YOUTUBE just like everybody else, but a few people know that they actually didn’t launch the song with that video! The video that we all have seen is an unofficially leaked video that was not supposed to see the light of day! Now that’s what is called the power of the context.
To sum up: if you wish to be a superstar, or a massively successful entrepreneur, or anybody of any value what so ever! You either have to be a destiny’s child or a careful follower of what’s written above. Obviously, destiny has the say in the end…
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