Start With Why

spectrum once you’re in a relationship with them; the opportunity is to figure out which is which before you decide to work with them.
    We all sit at different places on this spectrum depending on the product or idea. Most of us are fiercely loyal to certain products and ideas at various times and demonstrate left-side-of-the-curve behavior. And for other products or ideas we exhibit right-side-of-the-curve behavior. When we sit on one side of the spectrum, we often have a hard time understanding those on the other side because their behavior doesn’t make sense to us. My sister is an early adopter when it comes to fashion trends, whereas I’m firmly in the late majority. It was only recently that I finally caved and bought a pair of overpriced designer blue jeans. I admit they look good, but I still think they aren’t worth the money and I can’t understand why my sister thinks they are.
    In contrast, I’m an early adopter for some technologies. I bought a Blu-ray DVD player before they had perfected the technology. I paid about four or five times more for it compared to a regular DVD player. My sister can’t understand why I waste my money on all that “useless stuff,” as she puts it. We will never see eye to eye on this stuff.
    Each of us assigns different values to different things and our behaviors follow accordingly. This is one of the major reasons why it is nearly impossible to “convince” someone of the value of your products or ideas based on rational arguments and tangible benefits. It’s the ol’ Ferrari and Honda Odyssey debate again. Designer jean companies (or my sister) can talk to me until they are blue in the face about the importance of fabric quality, design and workmanship—it goes in one ear and out the other. Similarly, it can be proven, beyond a shadow of doubt, the rational benefits of choosing a $500 DVD player over a $100 one; my sister won’t hear a word of it. And so the game of manipulation ensues. Again, although always effective, manipulations don’t breed loyalty and they increase costs and stress for all parties involved.
    Most people or organizations that have something to sell, be it a product, service or idea, hope to achieve some level of mass-market success or acceptance. Most hope to penetrate the bell of the curve. Getting there, however, is easier said than done. When you ask small businesses about their goals, many of them will tell you they want to be a billion-dollar business in X number of years. The odds of that happening, unfortunately, don’t look good. Of the 27 million businesses registered in the United States, fewer than 2,000 ever reach a billion dollars in annual revenues. And 99.9 percent of all businesses in America have fewer than 500 employees. In other words, mass-market success is really hard to achieve.
    Big companies have similar challenges repeating their mass-market success. Just because they’ve done it once or twice doesn’t mean they know how to do it every time. The Zune, Microsoft’s entry into the multigigabyte mp3 player market, for example, was pegged to “take on the iPod.” It didn’t happen. Even if the quality is superior, there is more to succeeding than just the product and the marketing. Don’t forget, the superior Betamax technology did not beat out the substandard VHS technology as the standard format for videotape in the 1980s. The best does not always win. Like any natural law, the Law of Diffusion must be considered if mass-market acceptance is important to you. Refusal to do so will cost a lot of money and may result in a mediocre success, if not complete failure.
    There is an irony to mass-market success, as it turns out. It’s near impossible to achieve if you point your marketing and resources to the middle of the bell, if you attempt to woo those who represent the middle of the curve without first appealing to the early adopters. It can be done, but at massive expense. This is because the early majority, according to Rogers, will not try something until someone else has tried it first. The early majority, indeed the entire majority, need the recommendation of someone else who has already sampled the product or service. They need to know someone else has tested it. They need that trusted, personal recommendation.
    According to the Law of Diffusion, mass-market success can only be achieved after you penetrate between 15 percent to 18 percent of the market. That’s because the early majority won’t try