How an idea travels through a market

The five groups, in order

Everett Rogers set this out in 1962, studying how farmers took up new seed varieties. It has held up across nearly every product category since, which is unusual for a model that old.

• Innovators (about 2.5%). They try things because they are new. They forgive rough edges, they enjoy being first, and their approval tells you almost nothing about whether anyone else will buy.
• Early adopters (about 13.5%). The important group. They are not chasing novelty — they are chasing advantage, and they are willing to take a risk to get it. They are also the people everybody else asks.
• Early majority (about 34%). Pragmatists. They adopt once something is proven, and their definition of proven is “somebody like me is already using it successfully”.
• Late majority (about 34%). Sceptics. They adopt because staying put has started to cost them, not because they were persuaded.
• Laggards (about 16%). They adopt last, or never, and they are rarely worth the effort of chasing.

The gap that kills most launches

The dangerous part of the curve is between the early adopters and the early majority, and it is dangerous because the two groups look similar and want opposite things.

An early adopter wants to hear what is new about it. A pragmatist wants to hear that it is safe — which means proof, references, and somebody recognisably like them who has already done it and is glad.

A launch that goes well with the first two groups and then stalls has usually not run out of market. It has run out of the kind of message that works on the market it has reached, and is still repeating the one that worked in month one.

What actually tips it

Malcolm Gladwell popularised the idea that change arrives suddenly once a threshold is crossed, and identified three things that push it over.

• A few particular people. Not “influencers” in the modern paid sense, but connectors who know unusual numbers of people across different circles, specialists whose recommendations are trusted because they research obsessively, and persuaders who are simply good at convincing others.
• A message that sticks. Small changes to how a thing is expressed change how much of it survives being repeated. This is the same territory as the six qualities in our piece on memorable messages.
• Context. The same idea lands or dies depending on what is happening around it. Timing is not luck exactly, but it is not fully controllable either.

Where brand conditioning fits

There is a slower mechanism running underneath all of this, and it is worth naming because it explains why some brands feel trustworthy before you have thought about them at all.

Repeated exposure, in a consistent form, makes a thing feel familiar — and familiarity is read by the brain as safety. That is most of what a consistent visual identity, a recognisable tone and a sound of your own are actually buying you. Not recognition for its own sake, but a small reduction in perceived risk, applied thousands of times.

It is slow, it compounds, and it cannot be bought in a burst. Which is precisely why the businesses that maintain it for years pull steadily away from the ones that rebrand every eighteen months.

What to do with this when you launch something

Three practical consequences, in order of how often they are ignored.

Do not read early enthusiasm as proof. Innovators liking your product is pleasant and predicts nothing. The signal worth watching is whether an early adopter recommends it to somebody who was not looking for it.

Change the message when the audience changes. The launch copy that worked on the first fifty customers is the wrong copy for the next five hundred. Newness stops selling and evidence starts.

Build the proof before you need it. The early majority want to see somebody like them succeeding. That takes time to accumulate, and the moment you need it is the moment it is too late to start.