Page 39 - Marketing the Basics 2nd

Marketing as a corporate Function 31
work very hard to get the product past the critical early days and successfully to the growth stage.
At the heart of this effort is to understand how and why people adopt new products, services or ideas. In any population – whether it be as broad as Germans who drink beer or as narrow as dentists in Melbourne – most people don’t like change and don’t like to try new things. Thankfully for marketers there are exceptions. There is a small percentage, generally taken as about 2.5 per cent, who are visionaries or innovators willing to try out a new thing without evidence that anyone else has. These are people who don’t look around to see who else is using the new product but are willing to buy on their feelings and intuition. The next group is bigger, about 13.5 per cent of the population who are early adopters; next are the early majority (34 per cent), late majority (34 per cent) and finally laggards (16 per cent) who will often adopt a new product many years after the innovators. A key thought is that the early majority will adopt only after the early adopters because they must see a fair number of people already using the product before they are willing take on the risk of adopting it themselves. Thus we see that adoption is very much a social process. The late majority are again even more careful and will only adopt after they see a great number of people are using the product.
This model works with products and services but also with ideas. New ideas, smoking is dangerous for example, take time to spread or diffuse across a population and a majority will accept them only after the early groups, the innovators and early adopters have first come to accept the new view.
Some of the characteristics of each category of adopter that have been suggested include:
• innovators – venturesome, educated, multiple information sources
• early adopters – social leaders, popular, educated
• early majority – deliberate, many informal social contacts
• late majority – sceptical, traditional, lower socioeconomic
status
• laggards – neighbours and friends are main information
sources, fear of debt.