This is Chris Halliwell, from the Technology Marketing Center, chiming in to fill the gap as Bob Rutherford takes a must-do-real-work break from his terrific series of posts on government marketing. He will be back to finish his series in October. I would have posted sooner, but I was stumped for something interesting to say.
Another confession is that I haven't read the Innovator's Dilemma and the follow up books closely enough to provide a riff on the key themes, so even if what I am about to comment upon is useful, it's certainly no substitute for Christensen. Ok, moving on...
A client recently presented a puzzle: we built our initial (very) new technology product for the first-to-adopt (confusingly referred to in adoption cycle speak as Innovators) but now the market is moving to the next-to-adopt, the Early Adopters. For several reasons we must design a new product platform, but every time we talk to our current customers they give us a laundry list of new features that we don't think will be relevant to our growth opportunity among Early Adopters. We don't have relationships right now with very many potential Early Adopters and our market is extremely fragmented, so how do we know who to talk to about the NEXT product?
This is a common problem, especially in start-ups and new business ventures. I see it as a mini-version of the innovator's dilemma -- it is a market research/VoC sample strategy problem. The sampling strategy for a market research project is supposed to answer the questions: who is the relevant interview target, why are they the best target, how do I get to them, and how many of them do I need to speak with?
Here are some hints on VoC sampling strategy for disruptive technology, and/or for the NEXT market you want to reach in order to grow:
- Eric von Hippel's Lead User tool: go to the "edge" of your current customer base, look for the newest leads and customers querying you about using your product "the wrong way" -- these are often lead users for the next/new market
- To find the next potential group of customers, look at the adoption order for the last disruptive technology solving the same class of problem that your technology solves -- this is NOT technology adjacency you are looking for, rather problem relationship/adjacency
- In a sea of potential customers that look too varied or, the reverse, too undifferentiated to segment by adoption order, looks at communities -- who hangs out online or offline together; in each community locate the opinion leaders or most influential members of the community, talk to each opinion leader and then try to create a plausible adoption order for your technology
Any other ideas out there?
...I'll try to get another post done before Bob Rutherford returns, Cheers, Chris
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