Tech Giveaways on campus and Diffusion of Innovation
When walking on campus, we sometimes see giveaway campaigns or free trial events from various tech companies. Does this actually work? How can we use networks to explain the benefits of a giveaway? We can take a look at the reason behind giveaway campaigns with cascading behavior in networks we learned in class.
In a large group, a limit to the diffusion of innovations exists with multiple clusters. When the density of the cluster is greater than the (1 – threshold of the cascade), then innovation stops diffusing. In other words, some people are not willing to adopt an innovation until they observe their neighbors using it. This is also explained in the article According to the article, people adopt an innovation in different period and have characteristics when adopting an innovation. Research divided to five established adopter categories: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. The graph shows that only 2.5% of the target population takes risks to try, and 13.5% adopts without information to convince them. It can be observed that Early Majority and Late Majority are the majority groups, combined to be 68% of the target population People in these two groups adopt when they observe an evidence that the innovation works or other people using it.
This implies a giveaway or free trial campaign can be a good solution, targeting the majority groups (68%). Giveaway gives an opportunity to initially test the innovation for the targeted group, but it also increases the awareness of the need for an innovation. It allows spreading the innovation further to promote the innovation in a targeted way to cluster, especially those who need observation before using.
The article also explains the five factors that influence adoption of an innovation: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, triability, and obervability. A typical college student has higher chance of having an experience using a similar product or need of the product when it comes to tech products like wireless airbuds, tablets, or laptop. Comparing to other age groups, college student groups are relatively easy to understand and/or use the innovation regardless of the difficulty of the product and more willing to experiment with the innovation. Therefore, there exists higher chance of the adopting the innovation like tech devices for the students after a giveaway.