Diffusion of Innovation in Marketing

🌴First, what is Diffusion of Innovation?

🌼Have you ever seen an ice cube melt in hot water? You most likely would have noticed that it initially melts at a relatively slow pace. Its cold water slowly diffuses out into the cup of hot water. However, with time, the ice cube melts faster and faster and all of its cold water diffuses out into the cup.

🌼This is kind of like diffusion of innovation. Diffusion of innovation refers to the spread of products, services, ideas, and practices in a relatively slow initial manner before the innovation starts to spread quickly into the rest of the population.

🌴Examples of Diffusion of Innovation

🌼Remember when Bitcoin was worth next to nothing? You probably do not because you likely paid attention to its relatively mass adoption when its price hit $20,000 per coin before crashing. This is normal. Very few people risk their time and money trying an untested product, service, idea, or practice.

🌼The same thing tends to happen with almost every product you can think of, from the first automobiles to the first computers and cell phones. Either the cost or the risk involved proves too much.

🌼As such, many products and practices are adopted in a bell-curve manner. At first adoption is slow, as innovators and early adopters are the only ones risking it. Then the early majority and later majority make up the bulk of the adoption at a later time before the laggards come in. A good example of this is the Beanie Babies craze in the 1990s.

🌼Other products, however, are adopted in a cumulative manner. That is to say, a saturation point is reached on an S-shaped curve where there is little room for further adoption into a market. A really great example of this is refrigerators. Over time, it has come to pass that most households have one and there's isn't much room to force people to buy multiple refrigerators either.

🌴The Spread of Innovation

As introduction's definition implied, the speed at which innovation diffuses is not always the same. There are numerous factors that influence the spread of innovation. These factors include: