Successfully starting and maintaining a consumer community is difficult and takes a long time to do so. I would estimate chances of success around 1%-2%.

Using large generalistic communities for your communication in a way is quite similar to the traditional mass marketing. Even though companies are utilizing new methods, like virals, the audience is quite broad and communication remains expensive, just like in the days of push marketing on radio, TV, and print.

Why is so much budget flowing to projects with such low chances of success? I would like to share another perspective to working with communities.

I remember the late 90’s where CRM and data mining were big buzz words. And with some companies they still are. The point is to analyse data to find homogeneous groups to better fine-tune our proposition and communication. The interesting thing is that specialised communities are such homogeneous and focused groups.

The Harley Davidson Community in the picture below is a great example. This group consists of people that cherish their machine, the ‘Harley life’, and other Harley people. I think that a lot of marketeers could easily decide if this group is interesting to them, and if yes, make them a good proposition with a relatively limited investment.

Therefore, with specialised communities your CRM or data mining has been done for you and you can skip right to making the community a crisp proposition that suits them. To my mind this is low hanging fruit that can be harvested with small investments and quick returns. I have yet to speak to a marketeer from a large corporation who has realised this and acted upon it.

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Innovative products

To be easily adopted a product should have clear advantages over others, meet the consumers needs/behavior and not be too complex. An interesting statement was that it may be useful to package radical innovations with an existing known product. With a trustworthy companion the new product probably seems less scary.
Hester also points out that when consumers are forced to accept an innovation (e.g. ATM’s in the banking industry), consumers tend to be more negative and reluctant to adopt it. In these cases it is important to help consumers as much as possible, e.g. by personnel actively assisting consumers.

Personal and cultural differences

Recent research shows that not age, education and wealth determines if you are likely to adopt innovations early. Other factors like personal innovativeness and being a thought leader are far more important. Innovative people value curiosity, freedom and creativity more than traditions and modesty.
These values not only apply to individuals, but also to countries and cultures. Because of these cultural differences, some countries will easier adopt innovations than others. This is mainly due to differences in individualism (positive effect) and uncertainty aversion (negative effect). Innovations therefore tend to be more successful in e.g. Scandinavia, UK or The Netherlands and less in Southern Europe, Central and South America and Asia (including Japan, excluding China and Hong Kong).
Africa seems to be an interesting subject for further research though. Opposite to what you would expect, uncertainty averse cultures there seem to adopt innovations earlier than others!

For further reading:

• Arts, Joep W.C., Ruud T. Frambach, and Tammo H.A. Bijmolt (2008). “Generalizations on consumer innovation adoption: a meta-analysis on the drivers of intention and behavior“, working paper.
• Dekimpe, Marnik G., Philip M. Parker, and Miklos Sarvary (2000). “Global diffusion of technological innovations: a coupled-hazard approach“, Journal of Marketing Research, 37(1), 47-59.
• Frambach, R.T., H. van Herk and M. Agarwal, 2003. “Culture’s influence on innovation adoption: a global study of managers’ adoption intention of telecom innovations“, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit, 2003-14.
• Reinders, Machiel J., Pratibha A. Dabholkar and Ruud T. Frambach (2008). “Consequences of forcing consumers to use technology-based self-service“, Journal of Service Research (not yet published).
• Rogers, Everett M. (2003), “Diffusion of innovations“, New York [etc.]: Free Press.
• Tellis, Gerard J., Stefan Stremersch and Eden Yin (2003). “The international takeoff of new products: the role of economics, culture and country innovativeness“, Marketing Science, 22(2), 188-208.

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