Start With Why

accidental phenomenon. If they exist, then we should be able to design one, and if we can design one, we should be able to design one that lasts beyond the initial tip. It’s the difference between a fad and an idea that changes an industry or society forever.
    In his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations , Everett M. Rogers was the first to formally describe how innovations spread through society. Thirty years later, in his book Crossing the Chasm , Geoffrey Moore expanded on Rogers’s ideas to apply the principle to high-tech product marketing. But the Law of Diffusion of Innovations explains much more than just the spread of innovation or technology. It explains the spread of ideas.
    If you don’t know the law, you’re likely already familiar with some of its terminology. Our population is broken into five segments that fall across a bell curve: innovators, early adoptors, early majority, late majority and laggards.

    As the law states, the first 2.5 percent of the population are the innovators, and the next 13.5 percent are early adopters. Innovators, Moore says, pursue new products or ideas aggressively and are intrigued by any fundamental advance; being first is a central part of their lives. As their name suggests, innovators are the small percentage of the population that challenges the rest of us to see and think of the world a little differently.
    Early adopters are similar to innovators in that they appreciate the advantages wrought by new ideas or technologies. They are early to recognize the value of new ideas and are quite willing to put up with imperfection because they can see the potential. Although quick to see the potential and willing to take risks to try new technologies or ideas, early adopters are not idea generators like the innovators. But both groups are similar, as Moore says, in that they rely heavily on their intuition. They trust their gut.
    Early adopters, like innovators but to a lesser degree, are willing to pay a premium or suffer some level of inconvenience to own a product or espouse an idea that feels right. Those on the left side of the diffusion curve are the ones who stood in line for six hours to be among the first to buy the iPhone, Apple’s entry into the mobile phone market, even though they could have walked into a store a week later and bought one without waiting. Their willingness to suffer an inconvenience or pay a premium had less to do with how great the product was and more to do with their own sense of who they are. They wanted to be the first.
    These are also the personality types who bought flat-screen TVs when they first came out even though they cost upwards of $40,000 and the technology was still far from perfect. My friend Nathan fits this profile. I walked around his house once and counted no fewer than twelve Bluetooth earpieces for his mobile phone lying around his house. I asked him why he had so many. “Did they all break?” I queried. “No,” he replied, “they came out with a new one.” (There were also about five laptops, various models of BlackBerry smart phones and boxes of other gadgets lying about that never quite worked that well.) Nathan is an early adopter.
    The next 34 percent of the population are the early majority, followed by the late majority, and finally the laggards on the far right side of the spectrum. Laggards are the ones who buy touchtone phones only because they don’t make rotary phones anymore. The early and late majority are more practical-minded. For them, rational factors matter more. The early majority is slightly more comfortable with new ideas or technologies, while the late majority is not.
    The farther right you go on the curve, the more you will encounter the clients and customers who may need what you have, but don’t necessarily believe what you believe. As clients, they are the ones for whom, no matter how hard you work, it’s never enough. Everything usually boils down to price with them. They are rarely loyal. They rarely give referrals and sometimes you may even wonder out loud why you still do business with them. “They just don’t get it,” our gut tells us. The importance of identifying this group is so that you can avoid doing business with them. Why invest good money and energy to go after people who, at the end of the day, will do business with you anyway if you meet their practical requirements but will never be loyal if you don’t? It’s not too hard to recognize where people fall on the