So you’ve come up with a great product or service that will meet your customers’ needs beautifully. All you need to do is tell them about it – surely?
Well, no – it’s not a done deal until you get your amazing product turned into an adopted practice – that’s the real work of successful marketing.
Regardless of how wonderful it is, your amazing product requires people who do things in a particular way to change what they do.
Even at the best of times, that’s a big ask. If you’re targeting busy, stressed human beings in the first half of the 21st century, you can’t afford to ignore the behaviour change demands of your product or service.
Share, Consider, Trial, Sustain
Human systems come with huge inertia – there’s a substantial process to go through to get your wonderful innovative product or service adopted as a sustained practice.
There are 4 distinct phases in the adoption process that need to happen in order to get your result :
Share the idea of your product with your target customers – just let them know it exists.- Engage with your prospects to consider how they might benefit from your new product or service.
- Find a way for interested customers to trial your product or service and experience the benefits that using it offers.
- With these three steps in place, it’s now time to engage with your customers in sustaining the change – buying and using your products and services.
Sharing and considering aren’t enough
Without an understanding of the whole process flow, way too many great products and service offerings can fall over.
You present your product or service and they say “It looks great” – and you think that means they’re going to do it. But what they mean is something else – anything from “no way” to “if I had any time I’d try (but I don’t)”.
It’s not a yes till you see the change happening – repeatedly.
The process of adoption
You’ve just begin an extended sequence of conversations and negotiations towards the result you want. To successfully bring your product or service to market, you need to design the full process of sharing, considering, trialing and sustaining.
Our understanding of innovation diffusion has come a long way since the original “Diffusion of Innovation” in 1962. Build your marketing process on a strong foundation, understanding all the phases of innovation adoption in the excellent book “The Innovators Way” by Peter Denning and Robert Dunham.
Or give us a call if you need a new approach to getting your product or service shifted from invention to adopted practice.
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