Competitive Intelligence from the Technology Adoption Lifecycle Stage 5

Authored bycascade

Three Insights about Laggards: The Last to the Party

After a product or technology has been widely available and deployed for some time, there will always be some portion of the market that has held back from adopting it. The so-called Laggards, which typically comprise about 15% of the market, focus entirely on commodity technologies that have been driven down in price and are simple to implement, use, and support with common expertise:

  1. The Opportunity. While Laggards’ insistence on low pricing and foolproof technology makes them less than exciting, reaching them enables you to tap what is often the last revenue stream for a mature product.
  2. The Challenge. This customer segment’s common inflexibility in terms of low cost and aversion to technical complexity makes them resistant to the paid implementation or support services that you may have relied on for both revenue and ensuring successful deployment in previous stages.
  3. The Influence. Laggards are unlikely to exert influence on other potential customers other than other Laggards, and even that influence can be limited, since these customers are defined by their slow rates of adoption.

This is the last blog post in a series of five about the stages of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle. The previous parts traced markets and customer perspectives as a product moves from early pre-release through mainstream adoption: “Innovators: The Bleeding Edge,” followed by “Early Adopters: The Search for Business Value,” “The Early Majority: Is It Safe Yet?,” and finally, “The Late Majority: Reluctant to be Led.”

By Sean Campbell
By Scott Swigart

Home » Blog Posts » Competitive Intelligence from the Technology Adoption Lifecycle Stage 5
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