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There is a wonderful example of this strategy in action in Baltimore, the city whose problems with drugs and disease I talked about earlier in the book. In Baltimore, as in many communities with a lot of drug addicts, the city sends out a van stocked with thousands of clean syringes to certain street corners in its i
To analyze how well the needle program was working, researchers at Johns Hopkins University began, in the mid-1990s, to ride along with the vans in order to talk to the people handing in needles. What they found surprised them. They had assumed that addicts brought in their own dirty needles for exchange, that is drug users got new needles the way that you or I buy milk: going to the store when it is open and picking up enough for the week. But what they found was that a handful of addicts were coming by each week with knapsacks bulging with 300 or 400 dirty needles at a time, which is obviously far more than they were using themselves. These men were then going back to the street and selling the clean needles for one dollar each. The van, in other words, was a kind of syringe wholesaler. The real retailers were these handfuls of men — these super-exchangers — who were prowling around the streets and shooting galleries, picking up dirty needles, and then making a modest living on the clean needles they received in exchange. At first, some of the program's coordinators had second thoughts. Did they really want taxpayer-funded needles financing the habits of addicts? But then they realized that they had stumbled inadvertently into a solution to the limitations of needle exchange programs. "It's a much, much better system," says Tom Valente, who teaches in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. "A lot of people shoot on Friday and Saturday night, and they don't necessarily think in a rational way that they need to have clean tools before they go out. The needle exchange program isn't going to be available at that time — and certainly not in the shooting galleries. But these [super-exchangers] can be there at times when people are doing drugs and when they need clean syringes. They provide twenty-four seven service, and it doesn't cost us anything."
One of the researchers who rode with the needle vans was an epidemiologist by the name of Tom Junge. He would flag down the super-exchangers and interview them. His conclusion is that they represent a very distinct and special group. "They are all very well co
Does this sound familiar? The super-exchangers are the Co
Lambesis's intention was to perform this very same service for Airwalk. Obviously, they couldn't directly identify the equivalent of Mavens and Co
The first thing Lambesis did was to develop an in-house market research program, aimed at the youth market that Airwalk wanted to conquer. If they were going to translate I
At Lambesis, Gordon developed a network of young, savvy correspondents in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and Dallas and Seattle and around the world in places like Tokyo and London. These were the kind of people who would have been wearing Hush Puppies in the East Village in the early 1990s. They all fit a particular personality type: they were I
"These are kids who are outcasts in some way," Gordon says. "It doesn't matter whether it's actually true. They feel that way. They always felt like they were different. If you ask kids what worries them, the trendsetter kids pick up on things like germ warfare, or terrorism. They pick up on bigger-picture things, whereas the mainstream kids think about being overweight, or their grandparents dying, or how well they are doing in school. You see more activists in trendsetters. People with more passion. I'm looking for somebody who is an individual, who has definitely set herself apart from everybody else, who doesn't look like their peers."