The barriers to technology adoption are frequently higher than marketers recognise especially when that new technology brings seemingly huge new capabilities. Marketers often don’t anticipate the level of inertia that needs to be overcome for customers to change to a new product.

There are several examples where customers haven’t bought innovative new products even when they offer distinct improvements. New products almost always require customers to change their behaviour and scientists are subject to the same psychology as the rest of us when it comes to behavioural changes. However, scientists face additional barriers to change because they use set methods and operating procedures and have years of historical data against which they would like to compare and evaluate their results. Change is difficult.

Change involves a cost. There are broadly 3 categories of cost that customers incur; transaction costs – the price of buying the new product, learning costs – in terms of the time and effort to learn how to effectively use the new product, and obsolescence costs – when switching from one product to another makes their collection of things, like data in the case of scientists, less useful because it is no longer directly comparable to the data produced by the new product. These are all switching costs that need to be taken into account when companies introduce a new product to the market.

Another aspect which affects whether customers will switch to a new product is psychological bias, where people irrationally overvalue the benefits of their current product or method more than the benefits of new ones. For example, the adoption of independent reference standards in vitro diagnostic testing has been slow even though they offer well characterised, standardised and validated material against which to test the performance of assays. Pathologists generally prefer to go to the tissue freezer and use their own reference tissue despite the inherent limitations.

As marketers, we need to appreciate that the adoption of a new product involves trade-offs for customers. While they will get useful new features they also have to give up some of the benefits of the old product or ways of working. When planning a new product launch it’s useful to make a table which lists all the perceived benefits in one column and all the perceived losses that customers will incur in another column. These should be based on research and discussions with customers to understand their biases and perceptions. Then the task for marketers is to develop a plan to address these. Intel’s Andy Grove is quoted as saying that an innovation needs to offer benefits that are 10 times better than existing alternatives to be able to transform an industry.

Companies should fully appreciate what changes they are asking customers to make and not undervalue even seemingly small, insignificant changes.

New products that provide technological leaps forward are usually the ones that require the biggest ​behavioural changes. So it’s important to be patient and be prepared to deliver a long education process while bracing yourself for slow adoption. If you understand how customers are likely to react to the product, it’s easier to plan ahead. The most straightforward way to deal with customer resistance is to design products where the benefits far outweigh the costs. 

This article is an extract from a podcast on Life Science Marketing Radio. You can listen to the full discussion between Chris Connor and Marina Hop by clicking on the link.