Gaining Quantitative Future Insights: A Unique, Effective Method for Targeting Innovators and Early Adopters

Nikkei Research has developed a method for obtaining future insights that involves classifying people from "innovators" to "laggards," based on Diffusion of Innovation Theory (Rogers, 1962). Instead of identifying population segments based on respondents' subjective answers, the new approach focused on an objective information source - the times that people had first used particular products and services.

First, more than 100 products and services were grouped into 32 categories and 10 areas for evaluation. This was followed by an online survey used for categorization by data analysis. The survey was conducted from April to March 2022, and it targeted business professionals in Japan, with a total of 2,065 responses collected.

Adopter categorization was conducted using scores based on the times the respondents had first used specific products or services, categorized into 10 areas. Furthermore, the study explored the differences between segments based on awareness of product design, using CVPA (Centrality of Visual Product Aesthetics) measurement (Bloch et al., 2003).

By analyzing the data, the characteristics of innovators and early adopters were revealed.

Innovators and early adopters tend to value, pay great attention to, and have a stronger desire for good product design. However, it is important to be careful when evaluating the degrees of such sentiments. In addition, it is possible to see signs relating to factors such as commoditization of a given product when conducting analysis at the brand level for each segment.

Paying attention to the leading segments - innovators and early adopters, is very important, as they could act as predictive indicators for brands. Our new method enables us to precisely target such segments, and it leads to superior quantitative analysis for future insights.

More details are available at the following link.

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