The Tipping Point

An idea or a product may languish for months, even years, before suddenly everyone is noticing. How does that happen? How does a novel, a movie or even chitlins, reach that tipping point? That’s a question even Christians would like to have the answer to when they feel like they’re spinning their wheels and getting nowhere.

Pig intestines.

They’re making cash for Shauna Anderson. She had this idea that there were large pockets of people in the Washington, D.C., area, many from the South, who grew up eating chitlins - a regional delicacy made of pig intestines. These people missed eating them, and they didn’t know how to cook them.

In late 1995, Anderson quit her government job and opened the Chitlin Market, selling hand-cleaned raw chitlins in 10-pound buckets. The operation started in Mount Rainier, Maryland, and grew so fast she had to move it to a larger storefront in Hyattsville, Maryland. In September 2000, she reached a tipping point, and converted to an Internet-only business, chitlinsbyshauna.com.

What is intriguing to marketers and sociologists is what causes, or pushed, something to suddenly take off. How is it that a movie like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, starts in a couple hundred theaters in April of last year and in August is still in the theaters, now over a thousand nationwide, and a bona fide ...