What can we learn from early adopters?
Filed under: gadgets and gizmos, lifestyle, social trends, trends
Technology development lives because of early adopters. The early adopter, or gadget hound, is a special class (or case!) who leads the way in owning, and crowing about, whatever new product is released to market.
I love them.
You often see them waving their new gadget as if it were an Olympic medal, or camped outside gadget / tech stores in such a fervour one might think Anthony Robbins is lurking nearby. However, laugh as you might, for better or worse we need them.
We need them because they teach.
They teach, and I’m delving into marketing theory here, via a ‘social diffusion’ of sorts, to influence what may, or may not be, the next big thing in popularity. Early adopters are the trendsetters who set the tone in general consumer buying. Early adoption behaviour provides useful social meaning to the masses because their actions, and voices, communicate decisions to a wider audience, while also influencing innovation on whether that new ‘big thing’ sinks or swims.
The telecommunications world easily orbits this audience, but what is it that we can learn from these enthusiasts?
First, we can learn if it’s a device is worth buying . Opinion is varied but the early adopters are great at sharing their perspective – as we discovered in the HTC Desire Social Review.
Second, we can learn if that new technological toy is worth upgrading my broadband connection speed, bandwidth and quota for.
That one is a no brainer. It is.
As I’ve mentioned before, your internet connection is going to be the primary communications pipe delivering everything you consume – entertainment, voice, fax, television, and stuff not even yet dreamed up.
And for this you can thank the early adopters.
Where we once may have scoffed at these ‘internet intellectuals’ who bought the biggest port router and the biggest plan, they were actually foretelling what many are learning now.
So, rather than laugh at them it is now more important than ever to listen.
Are you an early adopter?
Have you a recent acquisition influenced by an early adopter?
Fax? How can you talk about _faxes_ and early adopters in the same article?
I’m a reformed early adopter; I used to “need” the latest of everything, but now it’s focused on just a couple of work-related areas where I don’t even have to foot the bill for the gadgets. So that’s good.
I do agree that the early adopters are a valuable source of lessons; it may take longer than expected for the behavior to trickle down to the rest of the society – and some may never – but much of what “everyone” will be doing a few years down the road can be seen in the early adopter segment today.
The challenge facing businesses now is how to utilise early adopters and the advantages and pitfalls they potentially provide. A poor experience for an early adopter is going to sour the publics perception of a new product. While an overall positive experience is going to induce more people to take the plunge and part with their increasingly hard earned cash.
Having grown up in a early adopter household I know that for all the beta-testing in the world, there’s always new ways to break hardware and software. But for your mainstream consumer, they want a product that does what it says it does straight out of the box – and fair enough.
A couple of examples I like from the software world are two game developers. The popular Blizzard (the folks behind Diablo, Warcraft, World of Warcraft, and Starcraft) are currently going through an exhaustive beta-testing program for Starcraft 2 – and in this they’ve got early adopters by the bucket load.
Blizzard have a reputation for delivering high quality, bug free games from the get-go. It may take them a while to deliver the final product, but the time taken means that the early adopter’s experience is a great one – thus generating more sales.
An interesting converse is Paradox (the cult Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron series are good examples from them), a Sweden based developer who actively engage with their early adopters. Due to their scale, Paradox isn’t able to pursue a massive beta-test program like Blizzard, but instead is very open about encouraging early adopters to come to their forums with any issues and work with them in coming up with solutions.
It’s an open model that has endeared Paradox to its fans, and helps shape any early adopters negative experiences into positive ones. A measure of the Paradox model is that they’re often still engaging with fans and tinkering with things and releasing new patches several years after release as part of a commitment to continually improving the user experience.
It’s much harder with an actual physical product like a headset or PC – but the strong theme through both of the above examples is the need to engage with your early adopters in a positive way so that you can make the best possible use out of their experiences to improve the overall customer experience.
I am Monkey Boy, Lord of the Early Adopters. I have always been on the cutting edge of technology. I’m thinking of upgrading my Microbee, because 32K of RAM is starting to become restrictive and the C64 looks to be fairly well established now in terms of software. I’m still uncertain however whether to go for the datacassette or the floppy drive. The floppy drive sounds like a good storage medium, but I’m worried that it will only be a short-loved fad. Thoughts? Anyone? Oh yeah, I also want to use it to run my own small business, so does anyone know whether I can buy business software packages on cassette?
Anyway, once I get a C64, I can’t wait to show my mates. They will be so jealous of my COLOUR graphics and 3 channels of sound. Nerd nirvana!
I am trying to replace Social Diffusion theory (Diffusion of innovation DOI) with a theory that looks at how consumers are different from each other rather than how they are alike. Early adopters are identified as more wealthy, educated and better socially connected, along with 26 other generalisations (Rogers 2003, p.298).
The original DOI theory comes from 1962 (Rogers 1962) and while still mainstream theory ignores advances in our improved understanding of social theory. I am writing my PhD on how consumers understand value in a new technology, 3G in my case, and consumers seem to focus on ‘value’. Value drives technology adoption. Different value drives early from later adopters, but value drives all adopters. Value is personal, dynamic and idiosyncratic. More on my blog…
Corporations should recognise the valuable services provided by early adopters and look after and reward this important demographic. All too often existing customers are shafted when new products or services are released. Despite (often) providing feedback critical to refining version 2.0 of the device (offering twice the features for half the price) and turning it into a useable product capable of being embraced by the wider market, early adopters are rarely provided with a viable upgrade path. I recognise that in a competitive market where goods are priced near marginal cost this may not always be possible, but discounts to upgrade should be provided more often. Early adopters sometimes effectively pay to beta test bug-ridden products and deserve to be looked after. Discounts could be offered for example to purchasers of Gadget 1.0 if they upgrade to Gadget 2.0.
It’s slightly off topic, but early adopters can sometimes actually be punished – eg online high interest savings accounts. Only new customers are offered the bonus interest rate of X%, while the existing customers are offered an uncompetitive rate. I understand why this is done, but ultimately someone who has never done business with that institution is offered a better deal than loyal customers who have actually helped to build up the business.
Is the success of some of the latest “must have” gadgets due more to “social diffusion” from early adopters or to highly skilled marketing campaigns capable of creating wide-spread demand through hype and hysteria? These are probably somewhat anomolous examples, but I suspect it’s the latter.
If your an early adopter don’t do it with Telstra