The classic Everett Rogers graph of product diffusion, including ideas such as innovators and early adopters, is well known even the world over, and the terms used can be found in every magazine article about new market trends. But is it right?

Rogers stated that adopters of any new innovation or idea could be categorized as innovators (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%), based on a bell curve. These ideas about diffusion of innovation are among the standard vocabulary of product managers and marketers. But in a Marketing Bulletin, 1995 article I was shown recently, Malcolm Wright and Don Charlett raise some big questions about the Rogers Model, stating that the Bass Model, also from the 1960s, is more accurate.

Examples they quote to show how the Bass model has given good predictions include consumer durables like televisions and clothes driers, but also more complex projects such as diffusion of cocoa-spraying chemicals among Nigerian farmers, spread of an educational innovation in the US, and purchase of photovoltaic home energy systems in South-West US.

So, what is wrong with Rogers’ model?

I had assumed like many that complex products need a little market testing by innovators and early adopters before the mass market will adopt them. However, some of the examples quoted above in support of the Bass Model instead are pretty complex. Wright and Charlett question two key assumptions:

1. That some individuals are “venturesome”, as a personality trait that is consistent and correlates with length of time in education; however, the evidence for this trait is weak.
2. That the early phase of marketing is dominated by media advertising, and word of mouth becomes important as the market begins to mature.

The Bass Model stresses the influence of interpersonal communication, including nonverbal observation, right from the start.

So why has the Rogers Model been so popular?

My guess is that it probably worked quite well when applied to buggy software that needed a period of beta testing or of being in stealth mode, but then the idea became over-generalized.

If Bass works best, what does that mean for marketers?

Before answering that question, I would pose another one. Why might it be even more important now? The key lies in network effects. Social media creates powerful network effects, so if the power of interpersonal communication was important before, it is now even more so. If the Bass Model is really more accurate, focusing on mass advertising as products are launched, or concentrating mostly on early adopters could waste valuable time and make the difference between product success or failure. The key is to realise that network effects are the best friend a marketer can have, and should be aimed for as early as possible.

It all started on April 15, when the ash cloud from the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland caused several European countries to close their air space. Consequently, Swiss International Airlines had to cancel all flights to and from the UK and Norway. Up until then, Swiss’s Facebook fan page had mostly served only as a marketing instrument. Fans, or customers if you will, were told about special offers, new destinations, corporate results or new website functions, for example. But when the volcanic ash crisis hit air traffic in Europe and the company’s hotlines had trouble coping with the amount of callers, the company’s Facebook team started to post updates and information there. And passengers took advantage of that. As increasing numbers of flights were cancelled, Facebook turned into a hub for customers unable to get information through Swiss’ temporarily overloaded website and/or telephone line.

Instead of having to tell each caller the same things (check if your flight is leaving at all and only come to the airport if you have a confirmation), the Facebook fan site served as a self-service support community. On such a community, customers profit from an accumulated knowledge base and can get help from other customers who might have had a similar problem or have other insider information. Only if this self-service support fails will the customer have to actually call a corporate hot-line. This frees up a lot of support resources and support operatives can use their time for the “serious cases” instead of having to answer the same basic questions again and again.

Dell, for example, has institutionalized this concept in their Social Community. They offer support forums, blogs with additional industry insights and IdeaStorm, an innovation community that lets customers post ideas on how to improve Dell’s products and services.

But, having a huge amount of information and knowledge available through the community doesn’t only free up support resources on the corporate level. It also improves a customer’s support experience, because even a skilled support operative can’t have an answer to every possible problem. If a problem is very specific and maybe not yet addressed in support handbooks or procedures, then other community members might be able to help instead. Of course, this only works if there are enough skilled community members. So key to a successful Social Support Community is to attract valuable members, give them incentives to participate, reward member efforts and maintain a helpful and open community culture. In creating a self-service Support Community and motivating customers to help each other, customers will get better help faster, feel valued and thus are positively inclined towards the company. So, not only can support costs be lowered, but such viral effects benefit the corporate image and ultimately sales, too. The power of Social Communities!

This is a map of the world that demonstrates the most popular social networks by country. You can see at a glance that Facebook is the dominant social media in North America and Europe. However, as we mentioned previously, the largest social media forum all over the world is actually Tencent QQ in China (generally referred to as QQ).

QQ is definitely the most popular instant messaging network in China with 300 million users. However, QQ is not a pure social networking websites, it’s a “complex”, which includes IM (Instant Messaging), online gaming, online music, social networking services, etc., and that makes QQ different from other social networking websites such as Facebook, Myspace, or Chinese local SNS websites like Xiaonei, Kaixin, etc. So you might question whether it should really count in this table.

What is clear, though, is how successful it has become. QQ has its own IM base. At the beginning, it was just a simple IM tool with no difference from others (Picq, Ricq, Ticq(TQ), Qicq, Micq, PCicq, Oicq, OMMO, who all imitated ICQ’s idea and were published in China in 1999). But why did only QQ succeed while the others all failed? One of reason is QQ had a very friendly user interface from the very beginning, that’s why QQ has been able to retain the same style from the start. Later on, QQ integrated multiple mobile communication methods, enabling users to send messages to mobile phone users through the platform. QQ also offers several other services such as QQ.com (news portals), QQ Game (online gaming), QQ Show (virtual image design system), Paipai.com (e-commercial transaction platform), and QZone (social networking service). So if we want to compare QQ with other social networking websites, we can only count in QZone, maybe as well as QQ Xiaoyou, launched in January 2009, which targets students in high schools and universities.

So actually QQ is a special case. The service first built a huge base of users, then they tried to make use of this base to promote their social networking service, a different approach to those original social networking websites. A ranking list of Chinese SNS Websites from CR-Nielsen in December, 2008 shows: 51.com, Xiaonei.com, Chinaren.com, Kaixin001.com, Myspace.cn, 5460.net, Wangyou.com, Ipart.cn, 360quan.com, and Cyworld.com.cn. QQ (or Qzone) is not included in the top ten SNS websites in China. I agree more with this viewpoint, that QQ is more like a combined IM tool. Tencent have declared many times that in the future they will focus more on the idea “community-based instant messaging”, which could lead to their future success. All in all, social networking has just started in China!