Literature/@beal1956

• title: THE DIFFUSION PROCESS
• authors: George M. Beal, Joe M. Bohlen
• year: 1956
• https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/17351
• 10.22004/AG.ECON.17351

More than a paper, this is a collection of papers that were presented during a conference. Around 20 works were summarized.

The focus was how farmers adopt new ideas, from which the following curve was derived (today known as the adoption curve):

Interestingly, the paper also defines different stages, extremely similar to the levels of awareness for marketing:

• The Awareness stage: an individual becomes aware of a new idea. Knows about the existence, but lacks details concerning it.
• The Interest stage: an individual wants more information about the idea or product. Essentially, he wants to understand the value of the offering.
• The Evaluation stage: the individual makes a mental trial of the idea. Tries to apply the gathered information in situations he has experienced in the past.
• The Trial stage: If the evaluation is successful, the individual will try the solution or idea, probably in a small-scale experimental setting (important: they need to understand how to make it work for them)
• The Adoption stage: once the trial concludes, the most important is that there'll be satisfaction about the idea. This means there'll be a large-scale, continuous use of the idea. It means the person has accepted the idea as good and will consider it in the future, not that there's a constant use of it.

The paper also discusses that people seek information from different sources at different stages. For example, awareness can be made by mass-media, while at interest and evaluation stages they rely on friends and neighbors for information.

Surprisingly, sales people are systematically ranked last as any source of information, except at the trial stage if there's need for specific instructions on how to use equipment.