Innovation Diffusion: Early Adopters and the Spread of Technology, pt. 5

Those in the Bohemian Mix segment belong to a larger group known as the Urban Uptown, as do the other Early Adopters, Money and Brains and Young Digerati.  Those in the group represent “the nation’s wealthiest urban consumers”, according to Claritas.  Members of this group are usually upper or middle class, college educated, ethnically diverse and diverse in terms of housing styles and family sizes.  As consumers, Urban Uptowners “frequent the arts, shop at exclusive retailers, drive luxury imports, travel abroad and spend heavily on computer and wireless technology.”

Claritas also gives the following information about Early Adopter segments:

Young Digerati — Young Digerati are the nation’s tech-savvy singles and couples living in fashionable neighborhoods on the urban fringe.  Affluent, highly educated and ethnically mixed, Young Digerati communities are typically filled with trendy apartments and condos, fitness clubs and clothing boutiques, casual restaurants and all types of bars — from juice to coffee to microbrew.

Money and Brains — The residents of Money and Brains seem to have it all: high incomes, advanced degrees and sophisticated tastes to match their credentials.  Many of these city-dwellers — predominantly white with a high concentration of Asian Americans — are married couples with few children who live in fashionable homes on small, manicured lots.

Bohemian Mix — A collection of young, mobile urbanites, Bohemian Mix represents the nation’s most liberal lifestyles. Its residents are a progressive mix of young singles and couples, students and professionals, Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans and whites.  In their funky row houses and apartments, Bohemian Mixers are the early adopters who are quick to check out the latest movie, nightclub, laptop and microbrew.

One of the interesting details about all three of these psychographics is that they are each heavily influenced by other people within the same group.  In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell points out the similarities between innovation diffusion and the spread of disease.  After writing the book, Gladwell said the following regarding these similarities:

“Once you start to understand this pattern you start to see it everywhere.  I’m convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.  This isn’t just a metaphor, in other words.  I’m talking about a very literal analogy.  One chapter, for example, deals with the very strange epidemic of teenage suicide in the South Pacific islands of Micronesia.  In the 1970s and 1980s, Micronesia had teen suicide rates ten times higher than anywhere else in the world. Teenagers were literally being infected with the suicide bug, and one after another they were killing themselves in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances…Behavior can be transmitted from one person to another as easily as the flue or the measles can.”

In Gladwell’s Micronesia example, we see that ideas tend to spread first (and most rapidly) within social groups as opposed to between such groups.  Hitwise data suggests that there exists a gap between each phase of the technology adoption lifecycle, a period of time in which a technology is in the realm of the Early Adopters before it reaches more mainstream acceptance among the Early Majority.  So what makes a technology bridge that gap and become a widespread piece of the marketplace?

Clearly, there is bandwagon effect taking place when we examine any type of diffusion research.  Those in the Early Adopter segments facilitate this bandwagon largely by word-of-mouth.  Luckily for those introducing new products, Early Adopters are more likely to blog or otherwise spread the word about whatever technology they have recently adopted.  In this way, Early Adopters act as gatekeepers to the world of innovation.

This data and psychographic analysis should, when the magnitude of it is comprehended, change the way that innovations are marketed to the public.  In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore discusses the gap between Early Adopters and the Early Majority, and suggests that marketing should follow the one-at-a-time adoption process in order to cross that gap.  In other words, marketers should focus on one group at a time, gaining momentum from the buzz created by Innovators and Early Adopters in order to market an innovation successfully to the mainstream.  Moore’s theories apply most efficiently to disruptive technologies.