The day I started my first technology marketing job my hiring manager presented me with a book about the technology adoption lifecycle. It is a phenomenally useful way of looking at the market adoption of a new product or technology, offering plenty of clear pointers around how you should be managing both your marketing plans and the lifecycle of your product.
Over the years the technology adoption lifecycle has been used in many books and other studies, you could be familiar with Everett Roger’s Diffusion of Innovations, or Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.
I plucked the image below from Wikipedia, I’m not sure I entirely subscribe to the percentages on this particular graph, but you get the picture.
Earlier today I found myself wondering how this thinking could be applied to the current state of gov20 adoption and deployment, and what it might teach us as we try and work out where the conversation needs to go next.
The goal of any marketer working with this model is to work out what materials or other evidence you need to produce to attract Innovators who will come and play with your product, then successively how you will produce the next set of materials that you need to move your position in the market to the next segment of the curve, picking up an increasing customer base as you go. As you pass over the peek of the curve you might also start to think about what you need to do to start the cycle again with a new product or technology and what this might mean to existing customers of your product.
For the model to work you need to think about a combination of the overall market and how you would break it down into addressable segments that you can apply understanding and action to.
For gov20 I came up with the following segments, your mileage may vary;
- Citizens / Consumers – consumers of services, people who vote, tourists visiting from overseas etc.
- Politicians / Civil Servants –creators of services, people who define policy, people managing budgets in government etc.
- Developers / Technologists – developers inside and outside of government building online services, departments publishing opendata, consumers of published opendata etc.
As the date for NZ OpenGov 2010 gets closer I thought I might publish a series of posts, one on each of these segments. Each post will talk a little about my own perception of how I think we are getting on and some ideas around what we might be able to collectively do next. I have no empirical evidence to present, but figured this might be a good way of opening the conversation.
More tomorrow…
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I love this model and have used it for a lot of things. One challenge I would like to explore a little is how you know where you are on the curve.
Great post, I look forward to the next.
Very good question. Assuming the time and the money was available to you, you would generally undertake substantial research into each of your customer segments to understand where you sit, and which steps will move your forwards. It is this feedback and research that would help shape a progressive marketing plan. Industry specific books like Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” help explain the process in a lot more detail than I can here.
For the purpose of the posts on gov20 this week I’m going to take a much more subjective approach and focus on anecdotal examples that are out there – two reasons for doing it this way – first is that I don’t have the funding to do the research that would be needed to do this properly and as a result don’t have empirical answers (!), the second is that I’d like to push for a little conversation on the topic by others.
When you look at the three segments above, I think we have a really positive story to tell in one, a mediocre story in a second and a very poor story in the third. (not necessarily in the order above).
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