Morning. Some of your customers arrived on conviction. The rest arrived because somebody went ahead of them.
Marketing.
The Adoption Curve
Of the customers who've bought from you so far, how many would have bought whatever you did, and how many bought because they watched somebody else buy first? Most people can't split that list, which is why the second year of a launch is where the forecast usually breaks.
Everett Rogers took his doctorate at Iowa State in 1957, studying how farmers around Collins, Iowa took up new farming practices. He was building on work by Ryan and Gross, published in 1943, which had traced the spread of hybrid seed corn through two Iowa communities. The same shape kept appearing wherever something new was taken up: a slow start, a steep middle, a long tail. In Diffusion of Innovations (1962) Rogers named the five groups that shape produces — innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards — dividing the population by how far each sat from the average time of adoption. Seven years later Frank Bass, then at Purdue, gave the curve an engine. His 1969 paper in Management Science described new-product sales using two coefficients: one for buyers who move without reference to anybody else, one for buyers who move because others already have. He fitted it to eleven consumer durables and used it to forecast colour television. Neither man was describing your product. Rogers was describing categories that had already spread, and Bass was fitting curves to durables that had already sold, which makes the shape a lens for reading what's happening to you rather than a promise about what happens next.
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