How to Find Early Adopters and Eccentrics
- Richard Murff
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
If David Ogilvy didn’t actually say “The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.” he should have. People aren’t lying, entirely, but most of us don’t have introspective access to our own motivations. From my own experience in advertising, I can tell you that focus groups won’t tell you much more than 1) the opinion of the one or two strongest opinions in the room, and 2) that humans are very social creatures.
E-commerce, that all seeing snitch to our when no one is watching id, does a great job on recording what we do, but not why. Feeling drives most of what we do even if, unlike the scientific process, they don’t come with explanations. I suspect that this because we are better off not knowing why we do things. We’d absolutely hate ourselves.
Ultimately, you don’t really care why the customer is buying that car, only that she does. Until she doesn’t. Then you’ve got a problem. Counter-intuitively, the more data we have, the less room that there is for factors that are hard to quantify or compute. The real why, however, matters a great deal when it comes to product innovation or just trying to gain market share. Subconscious motivations is crucial if you want to change behavior. And that is hard to know when the customer can’t articulate it herself.
I’ve written before that when you hit upon a “black box” – and there is no blacker box that human motivation – it is better to manage it’s output rather than control it.As social creatures, a great of those black box feelings get justified under a widely held consensus. It will make superficial sense, and so remove uncertainty on a logical level. On the social level many consensuses are widely held simple because they are widely held. And that, if you are trying to introduce your sensible innovation into the market, is your barrier.
Typical is Better than Average
At the risk of causing your corporate betters to pull what left of their hair out, I’d suggest a low-cost, out-of-the-box approach with a higher probability for success: Ignore the middle of the market and focus on a few outliers. It’s hard to understanding this looking at a bell curve, but if you stick to the data, the average person isn’t a typical person. In fact, the mathematically average person is very rare, if non-existent. On the other hand, you can’t swing a cat without hitting three typical people… and getting filmed by a dozen more.
The typical person is, as their mothers would gently put it, “special”: quirky in their own way, pleasantly eccentric or “a bit of an asshole.” Like the average person, an outlier that is a completely unsocialized dumpster-fire of a human is also mercifully rare and won’t affect your sales. Focusing on a quirky outlier will deliver underserved markets, where you will find your early adaptors less bound by the widely held consensus for the simple reason that they’ve made peace with being somewhat eccentric.
The QED is that you face lower entry barriers and quicker uptake at first. If you succeed, the second order effect is that these quirky souls will provide the social proof against a widely held consensus standing in the way of mainstream adoption. If a launch fails, costs and wider reputation is saved - because it was always a niche offering.
The Field Guide
If you’ve ever had the terrible idea that you’d like to be a novelist, here is your chance. Create a character profile of an early adaptor. Don’t write anything as silly as “who wouldn’t want this?” That will have you innovating for average, you want to shoot for typical. And people, typically, are a little weird. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be early adopters.As an outline:
Basic Information: name, age, sex, job and income
Problems: How is your product or innovation going to help them
Positives: What are their hopes and ambitions that put your product in a good light?
Negatives: Or put them off it?
If noting else, the human that fits this profile will be grateful that someone knows that they exist. Then you have a maven who will spread the word.
The first step to a market is an audience. If your team needs help an audience strategy,
