Technology Adaption Life Cycle

Cianos

According to "Crossing The Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore, a new technology goes through a life cycle as it approaches the market place and it's various segments, going as follows;

Pioneers, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards

Pioneers: The people who have their ear to the ground for new technology because it is their hobby. The people who would check it out just to see if it works, or just out of curiosity.

Early adopters: The visionaries who can see how this new technology would give them an advantage over the competition. They are risk takers who are looking to leap frog themselves in to a better position.

Early majority: Open to new ideas, but they must make business sense. They are not risk takers but rather looking for a marginal increase in profit or a marginal decrease in cost.

Late majority: Conservative when it comes to new technology, and usually only adapt when they feel they are being left behind. They like the stuff they know, if it works why change it?

Laggards: Those who will never, or nearly never be interested. They have close to zero interest in technological innovation.

Each segment has a gap between it and the next one, showing where a new technology marketing strategy can fail and progress falls down the gap. This is due to the fact that one should not approach a particular segment in the way you should approach any other. ie you can't market to a late majority the way you would to the pioneers.

The 'Chasm' is the gap that lies between the early adaptors and the early majority. This is where most ventures fail because they don't adjust themselves accordingly, and can't manage to find a footholding in the mainstream market.

Anyway, on to my question...

When it comes to marketing to regular consumers, as opposed to industries (which the book is mainly concerned about), how should the life cycle be altered?

An early majority businessman isn't the same as an early majority teenager. I think the above model makes a lot of sense, but how should one adjust the marketing strategy if you are not trying to market to industry but rather consumers?

Advice and input much appreciated

growler

I think that the categories are still largely relevant even in a b2b context, the motivations may be different but you still need your early adopters, early majority and the late majority, although the laggards probably don't feature in b2b.

Finding early adopters in a b2b context is much trickier, no IT Director wants to be the clown who invested in a software that bombs, so you need to get some early adopters on board as "partners" rather than paying customers as you can in the b2c world. You also need a few guinea pigs to test your product on in real life.

I've faced a similar challenge a few years ago, we went out looking for start up companies / divisions / offices in our target market and offered to build, deliver and customise the product to their needs at no up front charge (our contract allowed for us to start charging after 3 years, so the risk to them was minimal). Once we have a few reasonable case studies it was easier to (a) start the PR bal rolling and gain some industry press coverage (b)approach the larger players / budgets who were looking for an incremental saving.

finding those willing to take a punt on your product first day is the hard part, but that's why you hire people who are well networked in the industry to do the groundwork for you.

Tara45

Very interesting, thanks for the crash course. I must really re-read that book ...