Brand Adoption

14 min Read

November 10, 2022

The zenith of an effective brand strategy is when everyone who interacts with your business—staff, clients, the media, and others—can succinctly and consistently explain your brand. We refer to that as “brand adoption.” – a phrase that is casually said even though it requires careful planning and preparation to attain it. We all aspire to that perfect degree of brand adoption, but very few brands ever achieve it.

Theoretical Framework for Brand Adoption

Although most customers for a product share some needs, they are all different.

A product’s early adopters differ greatly from its later adopters in terms of their purchasing habits. There may be differences in some of their demographic traits, their shopping patterns, and their motivations.

The marketing professionals suggested an adoption process to explain the many purchasers acquiring a product during its life cycle.

Management needs to be aware of how consumers accept new technologies to develop a successful market penetration plan. According to Kotler, adoption refers to a person’s choice to use a product frequently.

Marketing professionals once targeted the mass market with their products. Because it was believed that everyone would purchase a company’s product under this theory, businesses began to make their goods more widely available to encourage individuals to do the same.

The majority of the money spent on distribution and promotion was wasted, thus it would lose businesses money.

According to this idea, businesses initially focus their offers on heavy users. This also had some drawbacks because different heavy users have different likes, preferences, levels of brand loyalty, and adoption statuses.

Due to their negative experience, businesses now prefer to contact early adopters with their offerings. Understanding innovation and the diffusion of innovations is the first step in comprehending the consumer acceptance process.

If you have a firm grasp on these two, you can use your knowledge to spot early adopters.

Any product, service, or concept that is viewed as novel by a person is considered to be innovative. This implies that, as long as someone views it as a novel, even an old product may be seen as an invention.

His lack of prior exposure to the substance could be the cause. The innovation diffusion process, on the other hand, involves the transfer of a new concept from its place of origin to its ultimate adopters, purchasers, or users.

We can now describe how consumers adopt new technologies. The mental transition that a person makes from learning about innovation for the first time to adopting it fully is the focus of the consumer adoption process.

This implies that a person who adopts an innovation goes through five stages. The steps of the adoption process will be the focus of the section that follows.

Brand Adoption

Consumer Adoption Process in Stages

When a consumer decides to accept a new product, they initially become aware of it but don’t know much about it. The consumer expresses interest in the new product and looks for details online. The consumer assesses whether it is worthwhile to try the new product in the third stage. The consumer then makes a small-scale test run of the new product to improve their evaluation of its worth. The consumer finally decides to utilize the new product extensively and frequently.

Awareness

The first step in the process of product adoption is being aware of a product’s existence and what it does.

A well-known brand gives new items an advantage in raising awareness.

In the absence of this, marketing campaigns must raise consumer awareness of the product as a viable option for an existing problem, or of both the problem and its potential solution.

Interest

When the knowledge about the product is relevant to them and the task at hand, a potential consumer advances from awareness to the product interest stage.

Depending on whatever product adoption group they belong to, they may demand different information.

In addition to considerations like functionality, cost, and customer support, it also depends on how they are intended to be used.

Evaluation

The previous stage’s focus has been narrowed to the Product Evaluation stage.

The customer weighs the benefits and drawbacks of trying your product and others.

Your efforts should be directed at emphasizing your strongest features, your relative advantage over rivals, and the best use cases while minimizing the perceived expenses of testing your product during this period.

Trial

The potential customer has already made up their mind to try your product.

This might be a free trial, which would lower the perceived cost discussed earlier, free samples, a product demo, or a first purchase.

Users test your service against their unique needs during the Product Trial stage.

They check to see if it lives up to its value proposition, whether it integrates with its tech stack, how much work it entails, etc.

Adoption

The buyer chooses to use the new product to its fullest and most frequent capacity. A good, service, or concept that some prospective buyers consider to be novel is referred to as a new product.

When people require a specific product of that general type and make that choice, they enter the adoption stage. Here, it is assumed that customers will buy the novel product and put it to use in problem-solving.

Sales are the primary indicator of this last step of the process, but another success metric for the invention is its visibility.

Don’t assume that just because someone starts the adoption process they will accept the new product. After any stage, including the adoption stage, rejection can happen.

The market doesn’t always adopt new things in a straight line. As your product develops, you’ll encounter several client segments. Each calls for a different adoption procedure.

Innovator

Market share innovators (2.5%) are enthusiastic about fresh goods. They generally don’t mind a few bugs and like testing things out. Although they provide excellent feedback sources, their love of novelty makes them challenging to manage over the long term.

Early Adopters

This group (13.5%) prefers innovation to novelty. Early Adopters look for a product’s functionality and help when they encounter issues.

Early Majority

They are hardly risk-takers, making up 34% of the market. Build trusting relationships with innovators and early adopters to reassure the early majority. Once they’re on board, their danger aversion will make them devoted clients.

Late Majority

The Late Majority (34%) is comparable to the Early Majority, except they are less tolerant of errors.

Laggards

This group of people (16%) doesn’t want to change unless they absolutely must.

Conclusion

According to brand adoption-marketing psychology, the adoption phase for a new product is the mental transition a person undergoes from their initial exposure to an invention to its eventual acceptance. Awareness, interest, evaluation, trial, and adoption are the five phases of the consumer adoption process.

Get more customers, increase your sales, and attract clients who pay premium price.