Case Studies: Is This Your Business? Q: When a company introduces a new product to the market, the first group to try it usually are the bold, adventuresome types; how do I identify these people? A: You are talking about a group generally called “adopters”, who are the vanguard of buyers involved in most product innovation. They have been studied for some time by academics researching in a field called innovation diffusion. When a (usually technological) product innovation is introduced, not everyone adopts it at the same time. Invariably, a small group tries it first, and then, eventually adoption spreads to society in general. A very large example would be computers, which at first were used only by scientists and others who had to perform large and complicated calculations. Soon, of course, innovations were developed and now computers are ubiquitous. Studies have shown that the sequence of adoption in society runs close to this model: the first 2.5% of the adopters are the "innovators" the next 13.5% of the adopters are the "early adopters" the next 34% of the adopters are the "early majority" the next 34% of the adopters are the "late majority" the last 16% of the adopters are the "laggards" For a new product to take off, the first two groups are obviously the most important ones. These have been characterized as: Innovators: Venturesome. This is a small group of people who display an obsession with innovation, and maintain large communications networks to share their eagerness to try new ideas and things. They are usually first to try a new product and exhibit a risk-taking personality (after all the product might be worthless). Innovators often have substantial financial resources to fund their habits (since new products tend to be expensive). They also often fit the “geek” role in society, and are somewhat outcast for it, but they also are the gatekeepers of the flow of new ideas into a social system. Early Adopters: Respectable. These people are usually more integrated into social systems than the “geek” leaders, and therefore have a very high degree of opinion leadership. Potential adopters look to early adopters for advice and guidance about anything innovative, so the latter often function as society’s evaluators and judges of new innovations. Because these people also have large interpersonal networks or access to structures that convey information (the media, for example), change agents try to use early adopters as entry points to the larger society. A 1999 study showed that innovators and early adopters were invariably drawn from groups with higher socio-economic power and education. In the business world, 11% of early adopters were company directors or senior management and 9% each came from middle management/administration, professional, or technical groups. Early adopters were also identified as heavy Internet users, particularly for communication. Therefore the answer to your question of how to identify these groups lies in Internet usage patterns. Clearly, the best method of marketing to early adopters is to identify and target the most popular (to early adopters) web sites and chat groups they visit. Usually these are grouped around a product sector. Other factors that might come into play include regional and cultural differences. For example, generally, the Western part of the continent includes a larger proportion of technology early adopters. Back to Resources (c) 2004, KnowPreneur Consultants

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