The Growing Importance of Tech's Late Adopters

Better late than never. And maybe more profitable, too. JL

Charlie Wells reports in the Wall Street Journal:

As technology spreads faster and product cycles get shorter, late adopters are an increasingly numerous and influential consumer group
Dustin Schinn still isn’t sure if he wants an iPhone. He once gave a friend cash to order an Uber for him because he still hasn’t downloaded the car-service app. A friend recently tried to get him onto Tinder, the mobile dating service, but had to install an app called Dater, because Mr. Schinn is still using a Blackberry.
Mr. Schinn, a 27-year-old Washington, D.C., resident, is a late adopter. And he’s proud of it.
“People make fun of me,” Mr. Schinn says. “But I often don’t feel the need for these new technologies...They require you to sort of constantly adapt to something new, and I often feel this is just unnecessary.”
Many people are late adopters or know one. When it comes to technological adoption, as much as 16% of the population is considered to be in the “laggard” category, with another 34% encompassing a “late majority,” according to a landmark 1962 study about the spread of new ideas and technology by the late University of New Mexico professor Everett Rogers. His theories have since been widely applied to everything from laptop computers to mobile phones.
Technical definitions of the term “late adopter” vary. Loosely speaking, it is a person who buys a product or service after half of a population has done so. Late adopters tend to share certain characteristics: They are skeptical of marketing and tend to point out differences between advertised claims and the actual product. They often value a product’s core attributes, ignoring the bells and whistles intended to upsell the latest model. They may not try something new until weeks, months or even years after the crowd has moved on.A 19th century French sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, explored how technologies spread as a result of imitation of the elite. In his day, late adopters were pigeon-holed as less educated, from a lower social class and with less purchasing power than innovators and early adopters. Terry Clark, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago who has written on Tarde, says technological and societal changes mean that today’s late adopters exist in all income, educational and social groups.
Ryan Fissel, a 35-year-old Columbus, Ohio, resident, is a late adopter; he tried Uber for the first time last year. He says he doesn’t really have financial reasons for waiting for the latest Hollywood releases to come to the Redbox DVD-rental before seeing them. It’s just that he likes to do his research. With an academic background in the humanities, Mr. Fissel says he enjoys methodically researching films and what the critics have to say—which he often doesn’t have time to do while the movies are still at the megaplex. “The last movie I saw in theaters was ‘The Hangover: Part II,’ ” he says. That was in 2011.
What separates late adopters and early adopters is that they each perceive products and services through a different lens, says Sara Jahanmir, a doctoral researcher at the Nova School of Business and Economics in Lisbon and a research affiliate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early adopters may have an emotional response to the release of a new product or service—and line up to buy the latest iPhone or Xbox. “It takes a lot of time to change late adopters. But once they’ve done all that research, and once they are convinced about a product, they are going to stay for a long time.”
That happened to Wes Platt, a 49-year-old Durham, N.C., videogame designer who says he is a “serial” late adopter. He mocked Facebook FB -2.97 % for a long time before joining. He’s new to Spotify, having been a loyal iTunes listener for years. His father was the one who finally got him to join Twitter. TWTR -1.35 %
When he first heard about Fitbit wearable fitness trackers, Mr. Platt remained true to form, even as his friends were posting their Fitbit step counts on social media. “At first, I thought it was sort of ridiculous—a little too Big Brother-y for me,” Mr. Platt says.
But he cracked when he saw a need: His wife wanted him to get fit, and he began to see how automating the process of tracking exercise could help him do more. Now, the couple and their friends compete in daily and weekly Fitbit challenges. For his birthday last year, Mr. Platt upgraded from the clip-on model to the wrist-based device.
Late adopters can seem more conspicuous than ever in a world where product cycles are speeding up for everything from phones to refrigerators. “Innovation has pushed up the adoption curve,” says Grant McCracken, a cultural anthropologist who has done behavioral research on Netflix NFLX -6.83 % viewers. There are so many things to adopt now, he says, “a lot of people have effectively bowed out of the innovation game.”
Late adopters are emerging as an untapped marketing force, with important things to tell companies about the role new products should play. Because they tend to be highly critical, late adopters can be useful to companies perfecting their wares.
In a 2015 study published in the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Ms. Jahanmir and a co-author outlined their “Lag-User Method,” a seven-step process for cultivating product ideas from late adopters.
Late adopters tend to want simple, cost-effective products focused on specific uses, the researchers found. By listening to late adopters of the old version of a product, developers can create a new version that is quicker to be adopted.
Blake Rector, a Portland, Ore., graduate student, waited until this past Christmas to buy his first smartphone. Over the years, as friends and family transitioned to larger devices with Internet access, the 33-year-old says he cherished his standard Samsung SSNHZ 0.00 % flip phone.
For the most part, he got along fine, he thought. His tiny phone was unobtrusive in his pocket, the battery lasted four days on a single charge, and he didn’t have all those distractions in his busy academic schedule.
But Mr. Rector felt the pang of adopting late in a world dominated by mobile Internet. With his wife scheduled to return home from a two-week trip to Africa, Mr. Rector and his flip phone headed to the airport. Hours passed, and he didn’t hear his wife. He began to worry but wasn’t able to find out much about his wife’s flight status.
“Everyone just expected that I would have a smartphone,” he says. “I tried the people at the ticket counter and they just expected I could look it up myself.”
He ended up asking a flight attendant who was taking a break in a coffee shop if he could borrow a few bytes of data. Only after looking up flight details on the stranger’s smartphone did he realize that he had come to the airport a day early.