Consumer Adoption Process

Consumers demonstrate different acceptance behavior for different products depending on variety of factors, for example, psychological factors, sociological factors, economic factors, personality traits and personal factors such as age and gender.

All customers do not exhibit similar adoption process when a new product is introduced in the market. Some are very eager to try out a new product or service and share their experience with each other while others wait till they get a positive response from others. This may be due to many reasons such as nature of consumers with regard to risk taking attitude, optimism, enthusiasm etc.

NATURE OF ADOPTERS:

Some of the categories based on the nature of the adopters are:

• The innovators or the first users are the risk takers and are enterprising in nature. They are not concerned about the result of the use of the product. They are pioneers in accepting the change.
• The early adopters are more forward looking people in the society. They adopt a new idea much before the others.
• The early majority consists of people who may not be the opinion builders but are reasonably quicker in adopting the innovations. They comprise a large segment of the target market.
• The late majority consists of followers in adopting the product. They adopt the innovation only after it has been tried by others. They are considered to be older, traditional people who are not risk takers.
• The laggards are slow in decision making and are also self conscious and conservative in nature. They are suspicious of change and do not adopt the product till they are convinced of satisfaction and optimum utilization of the product. They are usually old and situated at the lower strata of the socio economic order. The ones who are not convinced do not adopt the product in their entire lifetime. They do not accept the change at all. They are called non-adapters.

This information is valuable for a marketer who is interested in knowing the customer and his preferences. Marketer need to analyze and understand the market, competition, customer’s psychology thoroughly.

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