The Dangers of Extrapolating Early Adoption

From Everett M. Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations (1962) we got this terminology around Early Adopters, and then for some reason it got even more popular than the term Innovators. Here's the classic adoption curve we all would have seen.

So what does that mean for our business? It means that the innovators and the early adopters really bring in the early majority, the bulk of our business. They give us signs on what's our likely scale, what we should get right, what we should do less of, and so on. They've taken the leap of faith with our products, so we also love them more, and rightfully so.

Everett M. Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations 1962

There are two dangers of this focus on early adoption that were called out in this article I came across recently by a gentleman called Peter de Jager, namely:

a) People do not fall into one Change Adoption Category; they drift from category to category depending on the specific change/innovation. There are no people who are always early adopters in every category, and

b) The statement "13.5% of the general population are Early Adopters" makes two related and dangerous assumptions.
        a.     complete Adoption Curve will exist for any change..
        b. It assumes 13.5% of us will embrace any change,

Evidence of the incorrectness of this statement is found in two casual observations, he says;
      a) At the height of the Hula Hoop craze, not everyone was hula-hooping
      b) Not even 2.5% of the population have bought a Segway

The adoption terms are accurate only in hindsight; they tell you nothing about how a population might respond to a change/innovation.

I found it very insightful and enlightening. In addition, I wanted to highlight something I've been trying to convince various companies on for a while. It may not be just useless to listen too literally to your early adopters, it could also be dangerous. It's like entering the weld-shop without the safety goggles and here's why.

The early adopters are called out as a separate segment in all these studies because they are different. How different? Sufficiently different to be called out separately from the majority. They think and act differently and look for different things in products or services. What may be really cool and worth paying for, for this community, may still be cool, but not worth paying for by the early majority. Concorde stands out as an example, but that probably deserves a separate dedicated post.

Peter's examples on the Hula Hoop and Segway are appropriate to think about here. One of our current struggles in eCommerce now is the same. Less than 1% of the opportunity has happened in India, there is temptation but not logic to extrapolate our learning to the entire potential community. It could be okay to do in Durables or Telecom where more than half the potential population has been onboarded. But in nascent industries, there is really no reason to believe that the other 99% will behave like this 1%.

How much Variety is good?

a) a lot?

b) sufficient / enough?
c) too much?
d) any other_____?

It is not as simple as it looks. Sometimes I'm in a hurry and I just want to go right to the counter and pick up my stuff, sometimes I have the time to wallow. That's just me. Sometimes I feel a store isn't even credible if it doesn't have five brands of shirts, and sometimes I get annoyed when the salesperson 'encourages' me to try just one more brand. Imagine being led through a thousand shirt-options, to be told in the end it's not available in your size!! Extremely non-funny, this.

So it is complex, and all this while it's still me. There are other kinds on the planet with their own preferences. Mars and Venus, I  hear, are different. Mission-shopping and Impulse-Shopping is different. Routine and Occasional shopping is different. Variety could satiate or irritate. So is it that complex or are we looking through the wrong lenses?

Maybe yes. What the consumer looks for is availability, when it is mission-shopping and assortment, when impulse-shopping. Variety is the backend lever that leads to availability and assortment. A good retailers knows it is not wise to put your entire assortment on the shelf. I was chatting with an experienced retail CXO recently and he told me about this very interesting incident. Their shoppers complained of low variety, while their SKU count was actually higher than competition. After a drastic reduction in SKU-count, the customers turned around and said now you have variety. Counter-intuitive? Maybe not.

Maybe what gets articulated or captured as variety is simply the ability to find or discover your product.

Don't get me wrong - again - I'm not saying variety is bad, and I'm not saying the buyer wants only one choice (aside - views from Google might be interesting, I really want to know who the search engine impresses with the total number of results and time, and I really want to know how many ever clicked the "I'm feeling lucky" button).

But if we are on the same page, implications are many-fold for retailers and marketplaces. When one is creating the initial assortment, variety adds to the experience and lends credibility. Beyond a point, it could add to confusion. This is super-critical in the online world, where one might feel real estate is free or unlimited, while it is actually not. The first-fold of the homepage is not unlimited space. More important, the buyer's ability to process information and his / her patience is always limited. It could be cool to say I have 247,000 results for your search, but unless we guide the buyer to what (s)he wants or needs, it's just noise. The buyer knows 246,999 out of these results are not what (s)he's looking for, and maybe we're giving him / her more and more of what (s)he's not looking for.

The two broad approaches could be either to curate via a Tailored Shopping Experience (i.e. we as store-owners decide / guess what you need, and show you only that one item you most-probably want, not the endless variety it takes to ensure we find a match) or via decision-aiding tools. Give the user a set of check-boxes and sliders to reduce the 247,000 to just 4 items (s)he can now compare on key attributes.

In a retail store, they lay out some key designs of shoes, in some sizes, in a way that looks most welcoming and least threatening. It will be scary if every size in every design is laid out on a table. You probably realize that's how good offline sales-people work. They just ask the buyer a few initial questions, narrow their eyes, lean back slightly and say, "I think I know what you're looking for", smile, and pull out four shoes you love.

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