Diffusion of Innovation and Supervision

Market researchers have long understood that complexity -- particularly in the form of too many choices -- can cause consumers to freeze up and not make a selection. Gottfredson and Aspinall (2005) argue that complexity is not just confounding for consumers, but that it can also contribute to lower profits. Innovation is perceived as a positive factor in business, but to a degree, innovation has taken on a life of its own. To illustrate how effective restraint can be in business, Gottfredson and Aspinall (2005) discuss the In-N-Out Burgers enterprise.

While In-N-Out Burgers is focused on creating its own particular brand of harmony around the number four, other businesses need to identify a balance based on the attributes that are the most valued by their customers. Contemporary consumers expect a level of customization that may actually serve to reduce the quality and expediency of their service experiences. Gottfredson and Aspinall (2005) present a sidebar discussion about a telecommunications company that produced so many different service package combinations that sales people were overwhelmed and consumers were confused.

Burgelman and Siegel (2006) provide a perspective they refer to as the minimum winning game (MWG) in which top management strives to focus a high-technology enterprise and develop it into a learning organization capable of keeping pace with market uncertainties and the rapid evolution of technology. A minimum winning game requires a smart balance of the three prongs of strategic action: the development and evolution of product, technology, and strategy.

Rather than taking a seat-of-the-pants approach that relies heavily on intuition, Burgelman and Siegel (2006) a systematic process is the preferred approach to balancing the drivers of strategic action, and they recommend using several tools designed to gather and analyze data. The example tools recommended by Burgelman and Siegel are the market requirement document (MRD) and the product requirement document (PRD).

Moore (1991) discusses the long tail of consumer demand, and introduces the five markets that consume high-technology products goods, acting as "innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards." Indeed, each market is very different from the others, thereby requiring different marketing and sales strategies. For instance, a substantial body of the market prefers and responds to calls of action that emanate from word-of-mouth. Most technology products fail to transition from early adopters to a mass audience, as it were, crossing chasm (Moore, 1991).

Software companies, hardware companies, and platform companies must appeal to the markets in different ways. Segmentation plays an important part in diffusion of innovation as consumer engagement can be developed and established with one target market segment and then be built up at a later date to include all markets. Regardless of where they fall on the spectrum of consumers, adopting high-technology products requires that consumers change their behavior in some way. As the marketer moves across the chasm, the mainstream pragmatic buyers will be drawn to the product.