“Adoption” challenges are everywhere

(I owe this one to my friend Lars Finskud at Vanguard Strategy – thanks Lars!)

Most of us are familiar with the idea of the marketing “AIDA” framework – how potential customers are first made Aware, then Informed about a product, then Desire it before Acquiring it. And there are many variations of marketing and sales “funnels”.

But we can do so much more with these concepts – rigorously quantifying them – with a dynamic structure known as the “choice pipeline”. Modifications to that model can also handle shorter term sales funnels, online promo campaigns, or customer on-boarding journeys, for example.

You can get a working model of this choice pipeline at sdl.re/choicepipeline. It is set up to show the marketing build-up of a simple consumer brand, but can be modified for B2B cases or for the marketing of services. The model can reflect the impact of word-of-mouth feedback on customer acquisition and sales, and if segmented could deal with cross-interactions between, say, key-opinion-leaders, early adopters and laggards.

Here’s two scenarios for how the allocation of marketing spend along that pipeline could play out over 36 months. (The 3rd chart included both loyal and disloyal consumers). The figure shows why there is a minimum viable launch budget for this or any product – the model calculates that spending half of that minimum amount on marketing captures too few customers to pay even for that lower expenditure.

But the marketing of a product or service is just one broad case in a much wider class of challenges – any situation where we want to understand and influence how any new behaviour is “adopted” by a target audience. Examples include:

• The adoption of new medical procedures by physicians, whether basic prescribing practices or advanced surgical methods.
• The adoption of new farming practices, such as precision agriculture.
• The acceptance of some desired behavioural change in an organisation.
• The take-up of low-carbon-emission behaviours by both organisations and households.

In all such cases, we need people to move from being unaware of the new behaviour, to being aware (though still not understanding it), to informed (understanding it, but not doing it), to active (doing it, but not committed), to committed (they will always do it, when the occasion arises).

But we need to be conscious of some other mechanisms, such as the tendency for people to slip back down the pipeline – forgetting a brand, or becoming disloyal in the consumer product case. And the carbon-emission case warns there is another possible state for people to be in – rejectors. who will not have anything to do with the desired new behaviour, and who may well influence others not to flow up the pipeline.

Incidentally, this model reinforces my case in an earlier post that “net promoter score” is a wholly inadequate tool for driving sales growth.

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You can save the model at the link above, and modify it for your own case. If you want to learn more about how to model pipelines – not just for customers, but for staff, product development and aging assets too – the “Extension” class #6 of our online dynamic modeling course will show you how.

By the way, if you are intrigued by the organisational behaviour change application of the choice pipeline, the states are 1. “I never heard they wanted me to change behaviour” 2. “I heard they wanted me to change, but don’t understand how” 3. “Now I understand how they want me to change behaviour, but I’m not doing it yet” 4. “I’m having a go at behaving in the new way, but may give up” 5. “I am fully committed to the new behaviour” … plus of course “I am having nothing to do with changing my behaviour!”. Barriers to moving forward include inadequate training on how exactly to do the new behaviour, fear of being penalised for failure, and discouragement from others in the last group. A division of GSK used this model to figure out training and communications plans to persuade people at lower levels to take more decision-responsibility, and backed it up with regular “how are you feeling” surveys to inform those plans.