I want it all and I want it now!

24 November 2009

assets/images/BlogImages/Diffusionofideas.png

If you were expecting to read about the famous Queen Song then I’m afraid to disappoint you! I hope you will read on though.

Like most people involved in Marketing in one way or another I believe in the theory of the Diffusion of Innovation made popular in the 60s by Everett Rogers and if you have more time please watch this educational video:

I became a stronger believer after working on project for a big FMCG company which had the objective of demonstrating it actually worked in practice: when you launch a product, it is more likely to be first purchased by a group Everett Rogers call ‘Innovators’ who are in the know and have a tendency to jump on all that’s new and talk about it so that others will start buying it. This company had believed in it so much that they had started to test their new product ideas among respondents recruited based on their being Innovators and Early Adopters, an avant-garde idea at the time.

Now nearly 40 years since Everett Rogers’ theory was first published does it still holds true in the same way?

In the age of Web 2.0 and with the advent of social media which it enabled, everything is happening so much faster. Information travels much faster of course! But another consequence is that new products are also adopted much quicker and most of all discarded so much quicker too.

One example of this is the iPod. I was fascinated to read that the adoption curve of the iPod compared to that of the Sony Walkman- the iPod’s equivalent for the 80’s, had a much faster adoption rate. According to a report published in 2004 by Steve Mulinovich, Analyst at Merrill Lynch, 2.5 years into its launch, the iPod had sold 1 Million more units than the Sony Walkman after being available for the same amount of time.

However, the question here is not just about the adoption rate but who starts the diffusion process. I’m convinced that if we surveyed people who had bought an iPhone in the first two years after its launch, their habits and beliefs would be very different to those outlined by Everett Rogers as representative of Innovators or even Early Adopters. By this I mean that they might not necessarily be the opinion leaders and social influencers that we might expect to find.

And why is that? In a trend dubbed ‘Now-ism’ by http://trendwatching.com/briefing/, consumers now ‘lust for instant gratification by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences’. And mobile phones play an important part in satisfying this ‘lust’ by giving individuals instant access to information through their mobile. The iPhone not only contributes to satisfying this instant gratification being a novel product but also serves to spread the good word about itself through its myriad of applications, including the social media ones, Facebook, Twitter and the likes. It is no surprise then that the iPhone ranked number one as the most talked about brand in Word of Mouth conversations on social media sites (Keller Fay Group).

While I would in no way venture to say that the theory of the diffusion of innovation is dead, I would hazard to hypothesise that the traditional Innovators, Early Adopters and Early majority groups of consumers have now melded into one group, who strive on social media (Millennials anyone?) while the later adopter groups are left behind as they always have.

Write a comment

Required fields are marked with *.