Adopter Categories

What are Adopter Categories?

Adopter categories divide consumers into segments based on their willingness to try out a new innovation or product.

Understanding Adopter Categories

Adopter categories, as a term, is part of the diffusion of innovations theory and has been applied to several studies, including marketing, organizational studies, knowledge management, communications, and complexity studies, among others.

The adopter categories were first named and described in the landmark book Diffusion of Innovations by sociologist Everett Rogers in 1962. According to his research, there are five adopter categories — innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.

Rogers identified key characteristics of each adopter category, such as the fact that early adopters have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the adopter categories, while the laggards are likely to be older, conservative, and more price conscious. The concept of adopter categories is widely used in present-day marketing, especially for revolutionary new products or services. For example, adopter categories are especially relevant to social network analysis.

Adopter Categories: Characteristics

In Roger's adopter categories, he acknowledges that not everyone possesses the same motivation to adopt new technologies.

When comparing these groups, the progression of adoption is gradual and logical. Most marketers and business developers find that bridging the gap between early adopters and the early majority is their most vexing task. It represents a fundamental change in behavior to adopt something because it is new and cool and then progress to judging and adopting some innovation because it is valuable, useful, and productive. In the case of the early majority, coolness might be a detriment.