The Five Challenges of Adopting Emerging Technology

If common sense is not so common, then vision is even more difficult to find. It is very easy to pick apart what is, it is much more difficult to see what isn’t. Most people don’t have the vision to see the promise of emerging technologies, and/or don’t want to take the risk to achieve the benefits. Why does the adoption or even exploration of emerging technology face so much resistance? According to a theory called Diffusion of Innovations (DoI) formulated by Everett Rogers, where he says early adopters make up 13.5 percent of the population. So by nature 86.5% of people are against adopting emerging technology because it is early. Early adopters generally rely on their intuition and vision.

 If you are going to create an innovative marketing practice, most likely you will need to experiment with emerging technologies. Here are five very common reasons given for not adopting emerging technologies and examples of how that thinking has been wrong in the past.

1. Its New and/or Unproven

2. No One is Using it/Our Customers Aren’t Using it 

3. There’s No ROI

4. It Won’t Work in Our Industry 

5. Its Stupid 

1. Its New, Unproven – the team, company, product, technology, are new, young, inexperienced, etc.  This is often true, and executives are often weary of using new technologies even from established companies. People have been warned or learned the dangers of going first or being an early adopter. “Wait until all of the bugs are worked out.” The problem is companies are treating the decision to use this technology in the same way they would make the decision about a mission critical enterprise level technology. At this stage all you are doing is putting a toe in the water and “playing” with the technology.  All technologies start out as new and unproven such as software as a service (SaaS); cloud technologies such as Salesforce.com. You need to have a different set of criteria for evaluating emerging technology that you want to experment with, versus technology that is critical to your operation.

2. No One is Using it, Our Customers Aren’t Using it – past examples have included Business to Business e-commerce, e-mail and social media. A high-end department store that sold couture gowns among other luxury items said, ”we sell luxury goods and our customers don’t buy those types of things on-line. (They now have a very extensive on-line store). A designer line of apparel said,  ”our customers value a high touch, high service experience, which you can’t get on-line. They wouldn’t like something as impersonal as buying on-line.” When we surveyed the customers, we discovered they loved the idea of being able to buy on-line and saw that as an enhancement of the store’s customer service. They now also have an amazing on-line store. I’ve heard the argument applied to expensive products such as diamonds, “no one would buy a diamond without seeing it first” (Don’t tell Blue Nile that.) I remember someone telling me only kids and pedophiles were on Facebook.  I’ve heard it said that women, elderly, minorities, and lower incomes are not on-line, therefore it does not make sense for us to have an online presence. And this same reason is still used as in, “No one is on Google Plus, it’s a ghost town.”

The problem with this line of thinking is it causes companies to be very late adopters, implementing the technology long after a critical mass or a company’s customers are using the technology.  

3. There’s No ROI – Fortune 500 companies who had billions of dollars in sales but wouldn’t build a web site as there was no ROI business case. They couldn’t justify diverting IT resources or dollars away from “legitimate” IT projects to build a web site. I remember people pointing to the losses  Amazon and eBay were accumulating as evidence that e-commerce wouldn’t work. If they can’t make money selling on-line, how can we? Sometimes, the ROI is not there because we don’t really understand how to use the technology in the early stage or how to generate a positive ROI, e.g. web sites that were electronic brochures and little else. Often companies will evaluate a new technology based on its ability to sell or help with branding and there are not enough users to get the return, but that too will change. Second, we forget that most likely the technology will evolve over time.

The problem with the ROI argument is it tends to be static versus dynamic e.g. as more users adopt the technology there will be more applications with a positive ROI, Some technologies are not as easy to develop ROIs  for and sometimes you have to look at the cost for not adopting the technology. 

 Can we see this becoming a cost of doing business?

4. It Won’t Work In Our Industry - somehow our company, industry, product is different from everyone else. The feeling is the technology won’t work in our industry or for our company because, “that’s just not how it’s done in our industry, or how we as a company do things.” For example, in our industry people don’t buy and sell stocks without a broker, or buy plane tickets without a travel agent or buy music without going to a music store or buy millions of gallons of a chemical on-line, or read newspapers, magazines or other content on-line. The more disruptive the technology, the more likely it is to be thought of as something that won’t work in “our industry” as we don’t conduct business that way. Those are the technologies that are more likely to be disruptive and our lack of understanding of them will hurt us in the marketplace.

In the first case the technology or team wasn’t proven, but it will be. In the second case, not enough people had adopted it, but they might and mostly likely will. In the third case, there is not an ROI, or we haven’t found one, yet. It just may be too soon. In the last case, it says the technology won’t work in our industry or company, based on how we do business today, it doesn’t address what will happen if we do things in a different way. 

5. Its Stupid – as in Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Four Square is stupid. It’s stupid is not an argument.

The fact of the matter is most of the new technologies, marketing or otherwise is coming from VC-backed startups, and because the technology is relatively new, there is not a lot of adoption, but that can change fast. When people say it won’t work in our industry, they mean it work based on how we have always done business. What they fail to realize is new technology have the ability to change the way our industry does things. And just saying a new technology is stupid is not a reason for not looking at it. In my next post I will look at over coming these objections.