The effect is often translated to "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer".
To start with, it originated from the Bible in the Gospel of Matthew. It states "For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them."
So what about it right?
The Matthew effect, simply explained, tells that faster starters will get a huge advantage over slow starters and as time goes on, the one who started faster will get accumulated results which will even widen the gap between the slower ones.
Here is an example:
This is a case of Matthew's effect when it comes to reading. You can see those children of richer families tend to read more at the very early stage of infancy. As you can see on the graph, the gap is widening at a good rate as time goes on.
Just as in the case of reading, when it comes to marketing, the "Matthew Effect" is applicable.
How fast you are going to adopt new technologies, platforms, and forms of communication - gives you that starting edge which can, in turn, help you widen your position against your competitor who was "pessimistic" about the whole new thing.
You can see this effect play out in real examples of brands:
- Zomato's Instagram page is always on the pedestal now, every time they post anything. They were the fast starters when it comes to meme marketing for the Indian market and it's hard to find any other brand posing threat to their dominance.
- Groww started content strategy on their youtube channel, which is now used as a benchmark by many other brands now thinking to adapt the same
- Nike started paying athletes to wear their shoes, now that's the name of the game for the industry.
.. and you can pretty much find a lot of other examples too if you look around.
Pick up fast, chances are you'll end up becoming the leader.
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