More ruminations on mass adoption
Did I mention that I like Rogers adoption curve? Yes I did. Here’s another thing that I’ve been thinking about it, that ties nicely into Mark’s thinking too.
The critical problem that a lot of today’s brands face is moving from the Innovator/Early Adopter groups into the mainstream Early Majority group. Of course this was written about in Geoffrey Moore’s famous Crossing the Chasm. Moore wrote solely about high-tech products but the patterns that he points out are true for any innovation or niche product/service that wants to go mainstream.
The critical learning, of course, is that while the early adopters are drawn by cool features, the early majority want to buy into cool lifestyles. They want to be part of something that feels cool, hip, the thing to do.
As Mark so eloquently points out, the way to do this is to create a behavior that people can (and want to) emulate. This is a crucial insight because it absolutely dictates the kinds of solutions that will and won’t work.
As we know from past experience, is extremely hard to create a behavior by telling people to do something. On the other hand, it’s much easier to create a behavior by doing something that encourages that behavior. This is why, for example, the invention of the Soap Opera was genius. Rather than telling women to be happy doing the dishes, P&G, Colgate and others allowed women to be happy by creating a new ritual. Essentially, they created a new lifestyle that women of the time could see themselves being part of, and importantly, a lifestyle that women could participate in.
I think this is why we found ourselves drawn to Marketing As A Service, rather than advertising. Today we are surrounded by brands, companies, ideas, services and technologies that are facing the same challenge. Almost anything can find an initial audience of “early adopters.” It’s the great, enduring brands or ideas that are able to root themselves into mainstream consciousness.
IMO, it’s the brands that do, not the brands that say, that will have the most success managing that transition.