I admit that I made it to page 436 in Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations before I said, “No more.”  The book chronicles nearly 50 years of innovation research, and it contains the studies and references to back it up (58 pages of research articles, books, reports, and studies).  It is an extremely readable book, but I hit an impervious wall at the end of chapter 10.  I think that the wall was the impending summer, and now I find myself scouring my dog-eared pages and random highlighting for quotes.  Kind of ironic.

I returned to Rogers’ book after reading Clive Thompson’s recent article in Wired magazine.  Using the research of Jacob Goldenberg, he writes that companies should focus on marketing to laggards in order to generate increased sales of new high tech products.  Often overlooked, laggards are a segment of the population who typically are the last people in a social system to adopt a new innovation.  Thompson and Goldberg’s contention is that innovators and early adopters, people who quickly buy products like the iPad, need very little marketing attention.

If Goldenberg is right, marketers have made a colossal error by snubbing laggards. Instead, they ought to be frantically figuring out how to market to them. After all, early adopters don’t need much convincing. But if you can figure out how to tip just 1 percent of laggards into the “buy” category, the upside is huge. What’s more, Goldenberg thinks word-of-mouth recommendations from laggards are supremely persuasive: If John can handle that new gizmo, anyone can, right?

I hesitate to say that this argument is wrong.  After all, it makes sense- get the laggards on board and there is another source of revenue.  Very true.  However, laggards aren’t the efficient choice for marketing dollars according to Rogers’ extensive research:

Laggards are the last in a social system to adopt an innovation.  They possess almost no opinion leadership.  Laggards are the most localite of all adopter categories in their outlook.  Many are near isolates in the social networks of their system.  The point of reference for the laggard is the past.  Decisions are often made in terms of what has been done previously, and these individuals interact primarily with others who also have relatively traditional values.  Laggards tend to be suspicious of innovations and of change agents (Rogers, 2003, p. 284).

I am neither an innovation scholar nor have I read Goldenberg’s research.  However, I tend to rely more on the big names when it comes to content areas that I have little background, and Everett Rogers is a well-known scholar in the areas that Thompson and Goldenberg discuss.  Rogers’ basic description of laggards calls into question the choice to deliberately spend marketing dollars on this population segment.  However, he would agree with Thompson and Goldenberg on one account: Don’t focus on the innovators (the people who will buy an innovation regardless) because they, like the laggards, tend to operate within a closed social circle of similarly-minded people.

What is a better marketing choice?  Focus on opinion leaders.

Opinion leaders are individuals who lead in influencing others’ opinions.  The behavior of opinion leaders is important in determining the rate of adoption of an innovation in a system.  In fact, the diffusion curve is S-shaped because once opinion leaders adopt and begin telling others about an innovation, the number of adopters per unit of time takes off in an exponential curve (p. 300).

The most striking characteristic of opinion leaders is their unique and influential position in their system’s communication structure: they are at the center of interpersonal communication networks.  A communication network consists of interconnected individuals who are linked by patterned flows of information.  An opinion leader’s interpersonal networks allow him or her to serve as a social model whose innovative behavior is imitated by many other members of the system.  The respect with which the opinion leader is held can be lost, however, if an opinion leader deviates too far from the norms of the system (p. 27).

It is an over-simplification to say that gaining the opinion leaders’ vote equates to innovation adoption and increased sales.  There are many other factors that influence the diffusion of a new product into a social system including the relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability.  That being said, in this period of belt-tightening economic decisions, would it make more sense to target marketing to the laggards or the opinion leaders?  Sure, if there is unlimited money, go after the laggards.  Yet, the potential for opinion leaders to push along the early and late majority populations in innovation adoption seems like a much wiser route.

As an aside I think that school administrators and leaders would do well to look at Rogers’ research. I think that much of what he writes about is applicable to professional development and school change.