Do You Know Any Mavens?

A couple of years ago I was exposed to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, which is a book about how ideas, products, and messages spread. In your business today, knowing how word about your business spreads is more important than ever. As technology expands the methods that we have to communicate and the ways that we receive our communications, staying on top of how to reach your customer and potential customer gets more and more challenging.

That's why I found Gladwell's book very interesting. He gives fact-based insight into how ideas, products, and messages spread and cites three types of people who are particularly important in doing so. In the next three Profitable Marketing Insights, I will introduce you to one of these types of people per Insight. In this Insight, let's start with the people who keep tabs on what's happening, the mavens.

A maven is an information junkie. An avid reader of information publications such as Consumer Reports, a maven knows a great deal about products and services and is continually expanding his or her knowledge base because this person has an insatiable quest to know everything. A maven can access information on multiple subjects. Mavens navigate Web sites and search engines with ease.

"What sets mavens apart, though, is not what they know but how they pass it along," Gladwell suggests. You see, not only are mavens very knowledgeable, but they also have the social skills to communicate that knowledge effectively. They have a strong desire to help others by telling others what they know. Their fascination with helping others keeps them alert for situations in which their knowledge may be helpful to someone else. When they find these situations, either in conversation or by observation, mavens spontaneously offer their knowledge without being asked. These are the people who walk up to you in a store and tell you to buy one product over another. They may also tell you where in a store to find a product or that a product is available at a lower price in another store.

Gladwell gives an example of a maven who noticed during their conversation that Gladwell mentioned going to Los Angeles. Without hesitation, the maven said, "There's a place I really like in Westwood. The Century Wilshire. It's a European bed and breakfast. They have very nice rooms. A heated pool. Underground parking. Last time I was there, five, six years ago, rooms started in the seventies and junior suites were a hundred and ten. They'll give you a rate for a week. They've got an 800 number."

Since this information came from a maven, Gladwell stayed at the bed and breakfast and subsequently recommended the place to several others. Giving this recommendation was uncharacteristic of Gladwell, and he realized that he had become a part of this maven's word of mouth about the bed and breakfast. In spreading the word about a service or a product, mavens live up to the Yiddish definition of a maven as one who accumulates knowledge. However, mavens take this knowledge a step further by giving it to another for the other's benefit. Once someone benefits from the mavens' knowledge, that person tends to pass the knowledge along to others.

This passing along of the mavens' knowledge gives mavens a critical role in spreading word of mouth about a product or a service.

Do you know any mavens?