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thank you very much that was a very nice introduction and it's very nice to be here or to be back here uh at uh at Illinois a lot of great things have happened at
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Illinois and I want to just mention a couple of them before getting into the main topic um I think everybody here knows that the American Marketing Association was
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founded I believe in 1937 here at the University of Illinois um Illinois back in that era was
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particularly known as a football school and it was the Supreme Powerhouse in football in America at that time the most famous football player of
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course was Red Grange called various nicknames to his prowess his coach was Robert zucki and a stranger to
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Champaign Urbana notices Zuki Drive Grange Avenue and so on in honor of these two people who excelled so much
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there is a somewhat sad story however to coach soup cake uh he refused to adopt an innovation
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and The Innovation was that of giving football players fellowships he saw this as the beginning of creeping commercialism of college football which
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of course it was and so he would have nothing to do with fellowships no fellowships at Illinois needless to say the football program at
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Illinois went downhill fast so here is a famous person who refused to adopt an innovation as many of you know but some of you might not know code sub key is buried
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parallel to the 50-yard line of Memorial stadium in a in a cemetery at this was at his wish that he'd be buried parallel to the
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50-yard line now a little about Red Grange and how he is affected some important things also um he was elected to the Board of Trustees
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of the University this in the years after his football greatness and he wasn't a very active member the record shows in
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attending Board of Trustees meetings but he did attend the most famous trustees meeting of all which happened uh
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I think around 19 um 54. the president of the University of Illinois at that time was a scholar named George Stoddard he had
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taught he was a psychologist and taught at the University of Iowa where he knew Wilbur Schram now SRAM is a very important name to me because
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he's widely considered the founder of the field of communication here at Illinois started the University of President wanted to hire Schram who he knew from
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Iowa and so in 1947 he made him a a bargain that he couldn't say no to president Stoddard hired SRAM to be the
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director of Allerton house the editor of the University of Illinois press the director of the radio station the director of the television station Director of Veterans Affairs
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anything that had anything to do with communication Schram was in charge of it in return Schram asked president Stoddard that he be allowed to start a
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Department of communication at first an Institute of communications research which would give the world's first phds in communication this all happened at Illinois around 1947.
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so SRAM did all of these administrative jobs and in the few minutes a week that he must have had left over ran this first PhD program in The
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Institute of communications research uh now Red Grange and president Stoddard come together in a famous midnight meeting of the Board of Trustees in the
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Union he said the Illinois Union Illinois and this was a meeting to determine whether the Board of Trustees had confidence in the president
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they were concerned that he was very involved in UNESCO and in the world peace movement and that he wasn't spending enough time as president here in Champaign
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Urbana so there was a vote of no confidence it passed so that was the end of Saturday's president and the deciding vote was that
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of Fred Grange Grange explained his vote by saying this guy's been buying too many pianos so Stoddard was out that also meant the end of all these
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administrative jobs that SRAM was performing so he was stripped in the weeks after this midnight meeting of being in charge of
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Allerton house the Wags in The Faculty Club at Illinois used to refer to SRAM as the Duke of Allerton um that was their favorite term for him so
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he eventually went back to just being the a professor he was a tenured professor and running this PhD program and it went much better after this no confidence
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in president Stoddard so a lot of history has happened here in Illinois those are a couple of the high points as I know
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them and I've been able to determine them let's now get into my presentation just for beginners here's a quick definition of diffusion
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it turns out that it's heavily a process of people talking to people interpersonal communication but more about that in the bass model shortly next here's a definition of an innovation
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it's very broad both the definition of diffusion and the definition of innovation are very broad Innovation is sort of what you think it is if it's new to you if you perceive it as new
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then it is an innovation next uh this field really got underway with a study of the diffusion of hybrid seed corn as many of you know
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this was a study done at Iowa State University and uh I want to tell you a little about this study because it has had such a long Shadow on
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diffusion studies ever since um Bryce Ryan was a new PhD in sociology from Harvard University and accepted a
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faculty position at Iowa State his main interest was in non-economic influences on Farmers economic decisions basically he was trying to understand why didn't
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Farmers choose the most economically Wise Choice when faced with such a choice Neil gross was a new Master's student from an urban background in Milwaukee
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who came to Iowa State and just as this project began Ryan offered gross a deal of the kind that professors have made to grad students over the years he said if
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you'll interview all these Farmers for free he's not talking about a research assistantship now then you can use the data in your Master's thesis all of which came to pass
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they selected two Iowa communities and it happened that these two communities of Scranton and Jefferson were neighboring communities to where I
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was growing up at the time on an Iowa farm in Western Iowa my community was Carol uh Jefferson incidentally was where George Gallup came from I can work the names of almost every one of the
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converse I won't it would take too long anyway one of the things that Ryan and gross find is amazingly it took about 13 years
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for the average well for all the farmers in this these two communities to reach a hundred percent adoption that despite the fact that hybrid corn increased their yields
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about 20 percent so here are people delaying for many years to gain a 20 percent increase in their the main crop that they were
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growing this seemed surprising at the time furthermore it took the average farmer about seven years to adopt completely that is to go from planting part of their corn acreage
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to hybrid to planting all of their corn Acres so seven years of delay on the part of the individual farmer this seemed these were very surprising findings
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uh how did I get trapped into this business it happened very easily I can tell you that and very naturally
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I had grown up on an Iowa farm as I said and I was puzzled I had noted the same thing that Ryan and gross found in their study my father and other neighboring Farmers
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would were very reluctant in adopting agricultural Innovations and I was getting an education in high school and in college in technical Agriculture and I came home
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and worked on My Father's Farm every summer and I was very puzzled as to why my father and our neighbors paid very little attention to what I
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told them little pipsqueak that I was about the latest and best in farming technology eventually after getting a bachelor's degree at Iowa State and Agriculture and
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serving in the Korean War I came back to Iowa State to study diffusion research Iowa state was sort of a Mecca in on this topic at that time
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my dissertation actually was a study of the diffusion of 240 weed spray in an Iowa Community College so you can see this was a sort of parallel studied to the hybrid Seed corn study different Innovation different Community but
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similar methodology while I Was preparing uh my review of literature for my dissertation to my surprise I found diffusion studies that
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had already been completed on the diffusion of educational Innovations among schools with some very similar findings likewise there was a study here in Illinois
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in four communities of a new medical drug it was tetracycline which diffused among medical doctors that is the prescription of this drug
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and so I included these studies in my review of literature chapter arguing that there was a general process of diffusion that seemed so obvious to me at the time
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my committee however composed of five elderly gentlemen uh were not so easily convinced my data analysis was
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um basically using um multiple regression to predict innovativeness when Farmers adopted 240 weed spray and there was a rather
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eminent econom attrition on my committee Professor Gerhart tintner of Viennese Refugee to Ames Iowa and I was sure he was going to give me a
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difficult time about my Beta weights I I was very uncertain about my Beta weights well we never got to the beta weights we never got past the review of literature chapter
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with committee members typically saying now Mr Rogers how can you maintain that the diffusion process applies to all kinds of people to all kinds of
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Innovations in all kinds of places with all kinds of cultures this is ridiculous and so here I was with my weak little voice trying to argue against these eminences
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and it didn't seem that I was convincing them at all you see I didn't really understand the purpose of a PhD exam I had accepted a faculty position at Ohio State University which began at
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nine o'clock the following morning this was Midday in Ames Iowa so um my wife was waiting with the engine of our Ford
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already running downstairs and I turned my dissertation in in the department office and on my way out of the building for I suppose the last time
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who do I run into but professor tintner he's reading a book as he walks along which was his habit but when we pass each other he says oh Dr Rogers he said um
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you know committee had many questions about how generalizable the diffusion model is but he said and this was over his shoulder as he walked off down the hall you could have an interesting book
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written out of your review of lit chapter well I went down I joined my wife and drove during the night to Columbus I told her about this conversation I
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said what a Nutty old guy and she said well you know she said sometimes people tell you something and at the time you think it's crazy and then you find yourself doing it as I did
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now there's a little more to this General diffusion model while I was at Iowa State my advisor George Beal and another faculty member with whom he worked
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closely Joe Bolin were asked to make a presentation about diffusion to the extension workers of Iowa and their annual conference which
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was in December of 54. and I helped them formulate this presentation in advance and then watched its enthusiastic
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reception and they were arguing that there were two main things to the diffusion model The Innovation diffusion process this is wonderful you just cough and there's water
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laughs um The Innovation diffusion process that is that people first had to know about an innovation then be persuaded and then decide to adopt it and then implement it and adopter
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categories that not all Farmers adopted at once and what were the characteristics of the first farmers to adopt and so on and so on their presentation was strictly about agricultural Innovations
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they were not interested in any of this silliness about a general diffusion model but as their Fame grew and as this presentation came to be in demand by
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various groups soon they were giving talks to civil defense officials about the diffusion of Home bomb shelters which was an important innovation of that time
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so it was beginning to be diffused and generalized in 1962 I was at Ohio State at the time I published the first book of the five
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Editions all all but one of which was called diffusion of Innovations and at that time there were about 400 diffusion Publications um two of them were in marketing and
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I'll say more about those later the occasion for the decision to publish this book I had sent it a prospectus for the book to five Publishers and four of them did
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not respond but the editor of Free Press headquartered at that time in Glencoe Illinois did his name was Jeremiah Kaplan and we
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met in Chicago at a conference in an old hotel that's no longer there the Edgewater Beach Hotel in the bar he invited me to a meeting in the bar now I'm the rural sociology
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Professor from Ohio State he's the Urbane big city slicker editor of an important publisher so he's applying me with um Manhattans I had never heard of
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Manhattan until that day and I think when it gets me to the right point he tells me I don't know why but I'm going to publish your book
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now I can't pay a very high royalty we can't print it on very nice paper and you can't have more than 30 figures in it because they cost more but I'm going
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to publish it and I'm going to publish it in 10 000 copies but I'm sure that 10 years from now we will be destroying most of those copies in our warehouse so this is a very
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gloomy unenthusiastic edited only in later years did I learn that that was his approach with every author and indeed he was wrong about the 10 000
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copies being left over in the um in the warehouse 10 years later in this book one of my main contributions in retrospect is I gave standard
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definitions of these terms and of how to measure them this of course was very important in launching a general model of diffusion one not limited to hybrid Seed corn or
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to 240 weed spray or to Farmers it made it possible or easier for anyone in any field to start using this model and indeed that began to happen in the
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by the 70s which was the second edition of my book in 1971. there were active sets of Scholars studying diffusion in each of these
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fields and others almost too many to keep track of in fact I've tried to keep track of how many diffusion Publications are published each year and became increasingly difficult to do
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because I had to go to specialized a greater and greater number of specialized journals here's a rough idea of the number of diffusion
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Publications as well as I could keep track of them by year or by decade roughly as editions of this book were published
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oh today I think there's something more than 52 5200 diffusion Publications but I don't think anyone knows for sure because they're published
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so widely in so many different journals that it's very difficult to keep it up to date record of the number and I guess it doesn't matter after you get past five thousand who cares for those five
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thousand two hundred or three hundred no all right I wonder who briefly describe three different applications of the model it is one real one argument for it being
00:22:08
a general model is in because it will apply to a number to a wide variety of applications and here are three of them three rather
00:22:21
different applications uh one that I had nothing to do with personally although my book did it was the Bible of the for the people who ran the stop age campaign
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when the epidemic began in the U.S it began in the U.S and when it began in the U.S it began mainly in three Metropolitan centers one of which was San Francisco and San Francisco was
00:22:50
really ready for the epidemic about 40 percent of the male population were gay because of the tolerant attitude of the city
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and so the stop AIDS campaign was organized by and for gay men to keep the epidemic from spreading in their Community they organized small group meetings of
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10 or 12 I came in they tried to attract opinion leaders to these meetings and each meeting was addressed by a gay man who was HIV
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positive and who spoke in part from personal experience about means of transmission and so on uh the seven thousand that were trained in
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these meetings stop AIDS estimated reached another thirty thousand out of the total community of 142 so they reached critical mass that was their goal was to
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train enough leaders to reach critical mass and then almost miraculously the number of HIV infections per year dropped
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the number of the percent of gay men practicing unprotected anal intercourse dropped and AIDS deaths per year dropped precipitously although part of that drop
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is not really due to stop AIDS but it's due to antiretroviral drugs in recent years at least so here was a success it came to
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be called the San Francisco model and it spread throughout the world even though it couldn't be applied exactly the same way in other cities because they didn't
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have a dense network of gay men as San Francisco did here's a definition of critical mass I think you use this term many people do some people call it other names like the
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Tipping Point the best title of the best-selling book by Malcolm Gladwell also very wisely the stop AIDS movement built on the knowledge which was then quite
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um clear that the very first people to adopt a new idea the innovators are not also the opinion leaders they're the group who adopt next so stop aides did a
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lot of things that were very wise next uh now to a case that is much more a marketing case in the early 1990s California and
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Arizona both passed a state law requiring that um in order for an auto company to sell any autos in these states
00:26:03
they had to sell 10 of the Autos that they were selling as non-polluting and at the time this pretty much meant electric vehicles so General Motors gets into this game in
00:26:18
a large way it's board votes two billion dollars for a project to design and manufacture and market a vehicle that was originally called the impact the
00:26:32
name was later changed this was a battery powered very Sleek looking aerodynamically styled powerful electronic vehicle here's a
00:26:45
photograph of the impact as it was called it was silent it was lightweight heavily made of aluminum along with a number of several marketing
00:26:59
Scholars I worked as a consultant to GM on how to introduce the GM in Southern California and in Phoenix and then in the Phoenix
00:27:11
era area the first step was ads in local newspapers to recruit test drivers and large numbers of them
00:27:25
applied in Sacramento as an example which is Jim deering's hometown there were seven thousand applicants in the first week they filled out a lengthy and odious questionnaire
00:27:38
to measure their opinion leadership and their innovativeness uh it turned out that they were mavens they were car nuts the people who applied 200 were selected in Sacramento
00:27:50
and that was typical in the 18 cities in which this introduction was launched each were given um this eight by ten color photo of a
00:28:04
red um impact and they were given 50 baseball cards little cards with the photo on one side and performance data on the other and
00:28:16
they were asked to distribute these to their friends they were supposed to post the color photo at their place of work or wherever then more test drivers applied
00:28:27
and were given the questionnaire and so on and so on the test drive was a 30-minute test drive of the impact with AGM Auto engineer sitting as a passenger
00:28:41
beside them the results of this expensive and very detailed introduction campaign were not satisfactory
00:28:53
there were only modest sails and rentals of the ev1 the impact's name was changed to the ev1 you can imagine why impact turned out not to be a very good name
00:29:05
for a lightweight aluminum vehicle on the road with big heavy SUVs and trucks and so on um and eventually this year early this year
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GM withdrew further rentals or sales of the ev1 and all of the EV ones that were
00:29:30
on lease were gathered back up by GM and sent to the junk keep in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago there's a sad photograph of a stack of EV ones being crushed for their scrap metal
00:29:46
which would has been sold to Japan so that's the end of this introduction why did it fail a basic reason is that Battery
00:29:58
Technology was very limited at that time and still is so that the vehicle could never go more than about a hundred miles without recharging it had to be recharged at a 220 volt outlet and GM
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hoped that as these vehicles diffused there would be more and more 220 volt Outlets free outlets at places like gas stations fast food stores and so on and that never happened
00:30:25
and then the hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius came along in the year 2000. and furthermore rather early on in about 1999
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the two state governments changed their mandate so that the Auto industry no longer had to sell 10 percent of their Auto Autos
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as non-polluting so everything went wrong that could go wrong with this campaign but at least the method of introduction was probably in my opinion at least in retrospect a very sound good
00:31:07
I'm now to a third application briefly and then to the marketing tradition into Fusion the internet has had one of the fastest
00:31:20
rates of diffusion of any innovation in human kind even perhaps rifling the cell phone today well actually two years ago 2002 it's estimated that there's more than
00:31:36
450 million users per day of the internet that would be eight percent of the world's population 61 percent of U.S adults the latest data from the Pew Center as of a couple days
00:31:50
ago show that that's now 73 percent risen in the last year uh the internet of course changed as it diffused it was constantly being
00:32:01
reinvented the World Wide Web Commercial Services and so on were added to it and if we looked at the rate of diffusion of the Internet it's a spectacular example
00:32:14
of the critical mass 20 years to get to critical mass and then in 12 or 13 years since a very rapid rise of diffusion here's a definition of reinvention
00:32:30
this wasn't recognized back in the days of the hybrid Seed corn study because you couldn't reinvent hybrid corn and to buy new hybrid Seed corn every year for genetic reasons but most Innovations
00:32:43
can be changed by the users as they adopt them and they do with inventions one of the problems with the internet's diffusion is the so-called digital divide this Gap that's created between
00:32:57
well now the 73 percent and the 27 percent the users are Urban well-educated Anglo higher income they tend to be computer owners and so on
00:33:11
and so they can do banking services purchase airline tickets do all these things we do sell old stuff that we don't want anymore on the internet but the 27 percent can't
00:33:26
next in uh one of the solutions and one of the reasons for The Gap is access people that don't own computers
00:33:37
or have them at work or at school can't really adopt the internet and so since 95 the first cyber cafe we see
00:33:50
cyber cafe springing up in various parts of the world especially outside the U.S but also in the U.S in areas where poor people live who don't have
00:34:03
their own computers next uh I've been involved in recent years as was mentioned in the introduction in Taos County
00:34:15
New Mexico is a very poor state it ranks 48th or 49th and per capita income as we say thank God for Mississippi and within New Mexico one County Taos
00:34:30
county is the poorest county yes it's the center of the ski industry in the winter but that only lasts a couple of months and the rest of the time most people are unemployed so there's a very
00:34:42
low level of use of the internet in Taos County and um with a couple of colleagues in recent years we've been establishing Community Access centers some of which are cyber
00:34:56
cafes in charge of fee some of which are free Outreach workers to try to show teach people how to use a computer and the internet in their home
00:35:08
and then special websites on the internet that are of special interest to the people in Taos County Taos has a very high percent of diabetes very high
00:35:23
rate of obesity and a concern with nutrition is very important and we find that individuals can learn to use computers in the internet rather easily
00:35:35
okay now let's turn to the final part of my presentation and the one of probably greatest interest to you and that's the rise of diffusion research and marketing
00:35:51
in 1962 when I wrote the first edition of diffusion of Innovations there were only a handful of diffusion Publications they dealt with consumer Innovations
00:36:04
and there were only a couple of them so few that I didn't even consider marketing as one of the six main Traditions or Fields doing diffusion research
00:36:18
and to my surprise when I look back at my 1962 Edition marketing wasn't even cited in the index to the book so it was just sort of out
00:36:30
of sight for as far as diffusion was concerned in 2003 at the time of the fifth edition of my book uh marketing studies represented 16 percent of all
00:36:41
diffusion Publications the 5000 Plus and Rising fast it was one of the most important diffusion traditions why this growth well a very important
00:36:57
reason is Frank bass another Converse winner and his forecasting model I met uh Frank for the first time at a small marketing conference at Purdue
00:37:11
University I was at Michigan State University at the time and I remember he and I having rather intense conversations during the two days of this conference about diffusion he was very interested in it very
00:37:23
knowledgeable about it and very puzzled at the time as to why no one had made a forecasting model based on what had been found post-hoc about diffusion uh
00:37:38
Professor d kempt a European marketing scholar states that the Basque model is the most popular model in the field of marketing in any event there's a large number of
00:37:51
studies using the mass model there's several published each year and that's been going on since the advanced model was first published in
00:38:03
1969 the model has been used widely by marketing Scholars it's also been used by non-marketing Scholars it is grown to have some followers outside of
00:38:18
marketing and it's been used with a very wide range of Innovations not all of which have a marketing Focus so I think that's one big reason for the
00:38:31
rapid growth of interest in diffusion in the marketing field was the forecasting model and its possibilities of testing whether these predictions
00:38:44
then were coming true or not another reason of lesser importance is social marketing the application of commercial marketing strategies to non-profit products and
00:38:58
services such things uh as contraceptives in India and other countries um getting people to um have blood tests for AIDS
00:39:13
and other preventive Health Innovations Philip kotler at uh at Northwestern and Jerry zaltman who was also at Northwestern at the time wrote
00:39:27
some of the first Publications about social marketing and they've been used widely are applied widely in marketing and by many people outside of the field of marketing social marketing is one of the
00:39:40
hot ideas in the field of Public Health today so I think these two developments were quite crucial in this rapid expansion of interest in the diffusion
00:39:53
model in the marketing field there's some special qualities of marketing diffusion research that indicate their unique contribution
00:40:09
one is this greater concern with prediction almost none of the other traditions of diffusion study none of them to my extent have an
00:40:20
interest in forecasting or prediction and in marketing of course thanks to Frank bass's model we do the marketing diffusion studies are also
00:40:33
many of them are experimental studies often field experiments in which in collaboration with the marketer the company that owns the product that's
00:40:45
being introduced it is introduced in one way method a as opposed to Method B and the two are compared and thus we've been able to learn some things in marketing
00:40:58
about diffusion that other Traditions have not explored and in general the marketing studies are more quantitative I'm sure you're not surprised but they're not all
00:41:11
quantitative uh today there's a number of marketing diffusion studies underway of new telecommunication Technologies like cell phones and the internet in various
00:41:32
countries and there's a strong tradition of international comparisons of rates of diffusion by marketing Scholars now for a couple of conclusions one of
00:41:49
which I think is the strong evidence from applications and from the growth of interest in the diffusion field to various
00:42:01
scholarly fields that it is indeed a general process that it does apply across a range of conditions different kinds of people different kinds of Innovations
00:42:14
and there are General patterns and regularities that emerge and really that's what I devoted my life my career to mainly is documenting these General
00:42:28
patterns and regularities and my books have all argued for a general diffusion model the diffusion research is 60 years old
00:42:39
and most models don't last that long in any field and here the interest in the diffusion model seems to be going on chugging
00:42:55
along at about the same rate as previously by my calculations there's about 120 new diffusion Publications a year roughly 20 of those would be in the field of marketing
00:43:08
and so interest in the tradition seems to be continuing and I expect it will in the future but there's never going to be a sixth edition of my diffusion book I'm
00:43:22
done writing oh thank you very much
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