Using The Adoption Life Cycle To Pace Your Marketing And Storytelling
The adoption lifecycle is the speed at which your customer groups adopt or accept your product, service or creation. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or "bell curve." The demographic and psychological profiles of each adoption group were originally specified by the North Central Rural Sociology Committee, Subcommittee for the Study of Diffusion of Farm Practices
The report broke out the groups as follows:
Innovators
Early adopters
Early majority
Late majority
Laggards
The adoption lifecycle, and its
accompanying groups, is really important for understanding the
marketing and storytelling that needs to happen for your product,
service or creation.
If you analyze the ways in which Bungie executed their
marketing in the first two phases, you can see that they focused
solely on the innovators and early adopters and the amount of
marketing they did matched the height of the curve.
Let's take a look at this modified chart. On its own, it
simply shows the average number of people in each of the adoption
groups. This is useful, as it will help you determine who should be
in each group, but it's not particularly helpful when looking at a
launch calendar or plotting out your marketing activities.
Looking at the new chart above, you can begin to see that the number of people in each stage of the adoption lifecycle has a direct correlation to both time and effort. Let's break this down by group.
Innovators and early
adopters
o When to Market to this Group:
First
o Amount of Time Spent Marketing to
this Group: 30% of Total Effort
Marketing to this group first is important because this
contains the group of individuals who are your most loyal
customers. These are the people who are the most interested in what
you are creating and may even want to be involved in the process
early on (beta testers, for example.)
In terms of effort spent for this group, we want to spend less
of our marketing efforts here because they are already, in many
cases, on board and need less convincing that what you are creating
is for them.However, it is still important to create high quality,
high calibre marketing pieces for them as they will be the most
appreciative (and critical) of what it is you are producing.
Early and late majority
adopters
o When to Market to this Group:
Second
o Amount of Time Spent Marketing to
this Group: 60% of Total Effort
Early and late majority adopters are what some people refer to
as your "mainstream audience." This is your largest group and will
represent the majority of your sales so it makes sense that you
would focus more effort and time on this group in particular.
This group may also need more convincing, more examples and
more time to become emotionally invested in what it is you are
selling. So, it is important to implement a wide range of marketing
activities for this group so that you can hit the various
demographic groups that exist here.
Laggards
o When to Market to this Group:
Last
o Amount of Time Spent Marketing to
this Group: 10% of Total Effort
Lastly, you'll want to conserve your final marketing efforts
to the laggards. This group represents the potential customers that
are on the fringe and will likely need a lot of convincing and
emotional pull in order to convert them from potential to actual
customer.
Marketing to this group takes effort and does not represent a
large number of potential sales so it is best to keep them last in
your launch plans and marketing efforts.
Now that we've uncovered the adoption lifecycle, and the
groups that exist within it, let's continue looking at how Bungie
launched Destiny and made it a huge success.
CHAPTER TWO SUMMARY
(TL;DR)
Know your adoption lifecycle early on and use it to pace your
marketing calendar and efforts.