The Law of Diffusion of Innovations is an existing concept where the speed of adoption of a new idea is demonstrated as it goes from inception to full market adoption. Popular in the startup world, the Law has been used to quantify some interesting points – specifically that, at the 15% to 18% threshold, the marketing message for a startup must change as the subject group changes.
We are currently working on a subset of separate science that may show the specific order of adoption in the marketplace. As adoption is predictable in its rate, then it would be logical to assume that the types of people who adopt at various stages are predictable as well. By understanding their thinking methods, then adoption could be made more scientific as opposed to chance – and marketing messages would be more useful and helpful to potential customers vs having to resort to deviousness and annoying schemes. Startup success rates would increase dramatically if they were marketing to the proper group at each stage in the cycle – and startup failures would be due to poor product design and execution as opposed to making mistakes in the trial-and-error method of getting the message to consumers. If this concept makes it to the mainstream, it would turn the startup process into a more useful dialogue between companies and consumers vs the high-risk model that it currently is.