Roger'S Five Factors

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This reading discusses about Roger’s Five Factors. These factors give detailed information on how innovative products diffuse. Innovation adopters are categorized into different segments like Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards. Rogers and his colleagues have found 5 factors that can explain the variance in the rate of product adoption. These five factors include Relative Advantage, Compatibility, Complexity, Trialablilty and Observability. Roger’s Five Factors have been of great help to marketers who have a difficult time in finding out why some products diffuse easily and while some take time. The telephone example used here is perfect for explaining Roger’s Five Factors. Roger’s Five Factors are: 1. Relative Advantage: is “the degree to which an innovation is perceived as being better than the idea it supersedes”. This can be explained using the example of generic drugs. They claim to be efficient and work the same way as the branded drugs, but it is much cheaper than branded drugs. This gives an advantage for the generic drug market over the branded drug market. This is called Relative Advantage, as even though generic drugs might have the same efficiency as the branded ones, but they are cheap. 2. Compatibility: is the degree to which “an innovation is perceived as consistent with existing values and experiences of the potential adopter”. One of the examples given over here is the case of the concentrated liquid laundry detergent. It reduced the size of the containers and required only half the dosage for the same cleaning effectiveness as the old ones but the consumers, still locked to their old dosages, used more detergent than what was required. Even though at times compatibility with a previous innovation is not desired, it is generally accepted that “As the compatibility of an innovation with existing

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