Consumer Behavior - Adopter Categories

Running Header: UNIT 8 Assignment

Consumer Behavior

Unit 8

Adopter Categories

Unit 8 Assignment

Adopter Categories

The selection process to a consumer is an intricate and sometimes complex compilation of choices and factors that weight into those choices leading to an ultimate decision. A consume always has a choice to reject a product or service or to adopt a product and there is a process that leads to whether the consumers decision is favorable to the marketer or not. The adopting process is critically important to marketers because it indicates how long it will take for a product to achieve widespread adoption.

Consumers often have what is commonly referred to as pre-purchase time. This is the time that it takes between when a consumer first becomes aware of a product or service and the time to when the consumer decides to either adopt the product or to reject the product. Essentially, the length of time that it takes for a consumer to go through the pre-purchase process is a good indicator of how well a product will do in the market in terms of how long it will take for the mass market to adopt it. For example, let’s think back to a few years ago when mp3 players were very much a new product. For a long time consumers had used cassette players and had just recently adopted the CD player. Now entering the market was a new device that could store music digitally. There was no physical CD, Cassette or other item that contained the music, instead it was not a physical form but a digital form and it could be stored on devices called mp3 players which were built to store and play these digital files. One of the most commond mp3 players is the iPod (and its many variations thereof including the mini, the nano, the video iPod etc.). If we think back to when this object was extremely new to the market, we can certainly ascertain that there must have been a longer than normal pre-purchase time before the product was widely adopted by the mass market....