Adopter Categories
Are you an early adopter? Or rather, what kind of adopter are you?
Allegory time: in 1995, the once great internet company AOL pioneered the notion of chat as this crazy new thing. It offered one basic feature never before offered in real time internet communication: anonymity. So that semi-clad blonde hanging out by the beach could, in fact, be Bernie, a retired, 68-year-old cop from Detroit.
It was a case study in the famous sociologist Everett Rogers' vision for how new products are adopted, digested, and then crapped upon by consumers. See his pathbreaking book, Diffusion of Innovations.
Innovators, the first category, are geeks who simply like trying new toys. The journey is the destination, even more than Aerosmith claims. They like new toys for the toys' sake, whether they work or not. The next phase is Early Adopters. This gang comprises the religious zealots who adopt new technologies, processes, or venues, and like being perceived as being cutting-edge kind of people. They were the first 20,000 Teslas and the first 50,000 modern-day drones. They blog. They complain. They Yelp. They bring on the masses who follow them. The third and fourth groups are the early and late majorities who simply join a new trend because everyone else is already doing it. In the land of chat, the innovators started just because chatting was cool. The anonymity was kind of a funky toy. Early adopters were largely horny teens, bored married people, and other chatters on the fringes of sexual adventure. Then the masses of early and late majority chatters joined, and a bizarre confluence happened, as heat-seeking children ran into their parents and grandparents in the same chatrooms.
This was the beginning of the end. It gave rise to the laggards who are simply slow in adopting new anything. They are old school. They like their newspaper on paper, their coffee black, and their cars burning gas.
The study of adopter categories is a mini-industry now in the world, with so much wealth being created by so many well-funded technology companies, as the pace of change around the globe continues to escalate.
