01.14.06

New product adoption Part 1: Is there still a chasm?

Posted in Marketing at 3:47 pm by Jason Permalink

In Seth’s recent posts he explains the new product adoption lifecycle and explores how much traditional marketing has power over it. Some commenter’s seem to think that Seth is trying to contend the adoption cycle all together. I whole heartedly disagree…

You can’t market away the cycle. Even in his example when he removes price altogether there is still the power of ‘inertia’. And while it can be debated that new marketing tools could play a greater role than current mass marketing tools in speeding the cycle there is NO way to eliminate the process altogether. There will ALWAYS be a cost of switching. There will always be a few people who adopt early, middle, and late. All we can do is ‘squish’ the bell curve. And this is where the new, cheaper, tools of marketing come in. They reduce the barriers of information exchange and allow for trust network based diffusion, which WILL speed product adoption.

If price were to be re-included into this exercise it would only prove to make it more unlikely for the bell curve to disappear. It can be argued, as Rogers did, that this bell curve is like a queue where every person in the market is ordered by reservation price. There are people who MUST have the product now and if you engage in penetration pricing you will only be giving away consumer surplus to those who would have bought at the higher price. To argue that marketing could raise everyone’s reservation price to the point of the innovators is a little absurd, but perhaps there is an equilibrium price where we balance reservation price with profits, but that’s for a later economics discussion…

So, no, Seth is clearly not disputing the adoption cycle or the existence of Moore’s Chasm. In fact, if you read the punch line in part three he is challenging marketers to rethink their role. We need to realize that throwing money at the problem is not the solution. To answer his earlier question, marketers are not peddlers of lies they are the shepherds of the masses. They help to guide those who will benefit from an idea or product to the realization of that benefit. Couple this with the idea of Rogers’ consumer categories and it says we need to send the message in a different way for each class of consumer and potentially even change the product itself to meet changing needs as we cross each chasm to the next category.