Greg Detre
Friday, 02 March, 2001
as recommended by Delon Dotson
The book is about how marketing can take a high tech company with a good product safely through the different stages and approaches of selling to different groups in your market. It�s all discussed in terms of Moore�s Model of Technology Adoption. It�s a Bell curve, which divides your market (important: by �market�, he means �market segment�: customers within a market (segment) refer to each other for advice/opinions) into 5 psychographic groups:
innovators - technology enthusiasts
early adopters � visionaries
early majority � pragmatists
late majority � conservatives
sceptics - laggards
The largest portions are the early and late majority, a third each. There are small gaps between the innovators and early adopters, and between the early majority and the late majority, and also before the sceptics. But the real chasm lies between the early adopters and the early majority.
You can afford to put out a buggy product, and if it�s good and the technology enthusiasts can have cheap and ready access to it, they�ll be happy. If they�re impressed then the high-flying early adopters, who see technology enthusiastically but in terms of paradigm shifts in their business, can be swayed to make a major investment in developing custom-made solutions which you can then spin off as products. But the chasm lies in moving from selling a vision to the visionaries, to selling a safe product to a close-knit pragmatic cautious group who want reliability, no-risk gradual productivity increases and prefer to wait for the herd to adopt first. Having conquered the early half of the technology adopters, there is further money to be made when the R&D has been largely amortised, and you can re-package off various mature, safe products to the conservatives that will not prove discontinuous with what they already have. The sceptics are the last to give in, and point to why they don�t want it rather than why they do � but listening to their gripes can be insightful.