Social contagion has been shown to play an important role during new product adoption by consumers. Social contagion is the process by which consumers influence each other to adopt and use a product in a specific way. Current literature makes a basic assumption that social contagion is caused by the characteristics of consumers, who they interact with or who they live near to, and thus are most likely to come into contact with. However, the role that the product has in stimulating social contagion is conspicuously absent in this research. The current study focuses on identifying determinants of social contagion and investigates their indirect effect on the market demand for a new product. Determinants are drawn from both product attributes and consumer characteristics. Based on a three-part theory of social contagion, the authors propose variables that influence the fecundity, fidelity, and longevity of a product. Fecundity is the extent to which many consumers make copies of the behavior related to the adoption or use of that product. Sometimes, they will have to buy the product beforehand (like mobile telephony), and sometimes they will not (like Internet banking, assuming they already have a bank account and an Internet connection). The fidelity of a product is the extent to which consumers make accurate copies of the product-related behavior, in other words how the product supports the users in easily carrying out the behavior. The longevity of the product is the extent to which consumers keep on expressing the behavior over a long period of time. The main contributions of this study are that the relative importance of these determinants of social contagion are investigated empirically, and that the predictive power of this approach for estimating market demand is examined. Data are analyzed from 124 product-segment combinations of information and communication technology products from the telecom and financial sectors. These are mass-market products that have passed their initial growth phase. Using partial least squares path modeling, the main determinants of social contagion are identified, and the positive, significant relationship between social contagion and market demand is confirmed. Specifically, a main finding is that consumer characteristics have only a weak effect on the probability that social contagion occurs, while the main success factors are those product attributes that stimulate the creation of new copies of the product-related behavior; that is, product fecundity. This study offers product developers a new approach to assess the market potential for innovations, and the results provide recommendations for improving their products to increase the market potential. The authors note with respect to the practical applicability of their method that it does not require a working prototype, a market pilot, or other costly steps. It can be carried out with simply a description of the product, which means that it can be applied very early in the product development process.

This paper addresses three different approaches which can be employed to adequately answer different questions faced by product developers. These approaches differ in the ways users themselves are involved in developing the "real" user perspective. In participatory design, products and product concepts are developed together with users so that they fit better with what the users do and want to do. The modelling of product adoption quantifies the likely market adoption of products, based on user characteristics and product attributes. The evaluation of user experience describes a way to evaluate products in terms of their users' interaction with the product daily life. These approaches have originated from different areas and are often seen as competing viewpoints. This paper shows that the three approaches be seen as complementary to each other and suggests a method for to choose the right approach.

When groups of consumers share information or express their opinions about products and services, their attitudes or behavior sometime align without centralized coordination, a phenomenon known as herding. Building on pattern-based explanations of herding from the cognitive science literature, we propose a framework to elucidate herding behavior based on three dimensions: the speed of contagion, i.e., the extent to which the behavior spreads in a given time, the number of individuals, i.e., the proportion of the whole population expressing the behavior, and the uniformity of direction, i.e., the extent to which the mass behavior is increasingly uniform with one variant becoming dominant. Based on these dimensions, we differentiate eight patterns of herding behavior from slowly diffusing, small and disparate groups through to rapidly spreading, massive herds expressing a convergent behavior. We explore these herding patterns in an online setting, measuring their prevalence using over four thousand streams of data from the online micro-blogging application, Twitter. We find that all eight patterns occur in the empirical data set although some patterns are rare, particularly those where a convergent behavior rapidly spreads through the population. Importantly, those occurrences that develop into the pattern we call “stampeding,” i.e., the rapid spread of a dominant opinion expressed by many people, generally follow a consistent development path. The proposed framework can help managers to identify such noteworthy herds in real time, and represents a first step in anticipating this form of group behavior.

Purpose -The goal of this article is to show that memetics is particularly useful to predict the adoption of major innovations. Design/methodology/approach -Describes how TNO Telecom, an applied research institute in The Netherlands, adopted the theory of memetics to develop an instrument that predicts the adoption of major innovations. Explains and defines relevant aspects of this focus. Findings -Initial results are encouraging and suggest that the approach may provide qualitatively better results than the existing methods when applied to major innovations. Originality/value -Describes for the first time how the theory of memetics can be used to gain a real insight into the market adoption of major innovations as well as to focus and optimise product development.

As email, the World Wide Web (WWW) and videoconferencing become more and more familiar in daily life, does this mean that their use will also be commonplace in the way teaching and learning activities occur in educational and training organizations? Here we report on the results of a survey of 550 people involved with educational and training organizations in 41 countries. Even though these people already make personal use of email and the WWW, why or why not do they make use of these tools for speci c learning-related purposes, as for example, within courses? And what about a tool like videoconferencing , that is not yet commonplace as a personal tool? Will it ever make a breakthrough for teaching and learning? This study examines these questions and draws six sets of conclusions that are consistent over national boundaries.