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Abstract
In the 1940s it was first noted that the adoption of agricultural innovations tended to follow a
normal type distribution. Rogers (1964) articulated this process and classified farmers into
five groups according to their speed of adoption: innovators, early adopters, early majority,
late majority and laggards. Further, Rogers noted that speed of adoption tended to be a
function of wealth, age, education, risk preference, sensitivity to social pressure and
organizational memberships. This adoption-diffusion model has important marketing
implications. If the model holds, the optimal strategy for encouraging adoption is to develop
a marketing strategy that will encourage the innovators and early adopters to being using the
product, who will then influence others to imitate them, as they tend to be opinion leaders in
the community. However, the adoption-diffusion model was originally developed to explain
the adoption of technologies such as hybrid corn, where adoption is relatively costless.
Modern technologies can be quite different, involving sizeable expenditures in equipment,
infrastructure or human capital, and/or involving large additional commitments of time. In
this study, the relevance of Rogers (1964) adoption diffusion model is investigated for a new
modern technology “Irrigator Pro”, which is a computer based irrigation-scheduling software
developed by the US Department of Agriculture. For this technology, the market segments
with the greatest propensity to adopt Irrigator Pro were found to be different to those that
would be predicted using the traditional adoption-diffusion model.