The fastest way to spread innovations to mass market users

As new technologies and products flood the marketplace at an exponential rate, you have to wonder how one innovation succeeds and one fails. For creative innovators of the future, you must be able to sell your product to investors, buyers, and users, and tell an appealing story that causes your innovation to spread fast.

The Parental Anchoring Model

This rapid propagation of user adoption can be aided by a principle called the ‘Parental Anchoring Model’. Heres how it works.

Step 1: Define your innovation

Start off by defining what your innovation is. Be it a product, a service, a new technology, what are the key features and who are the likely early market users and why are they interested.

Step 2: Assess early market user traits

This encompasses the first two stages of the design thinking process. Start by empathising with your early market users. What are their likes and interests and how do they interact with your innovation. How do they ‘dumb down’ complex ideas surrounding your innovation in their minds. Define the base level behaviours by observing their use of the innovation. For example, the early adopters of Bitcoin were attracted to the blockchain technology, and were quick to invest in cryptocurrency. Most of the early adopters are developers and software engineers themselves that are constantly on their laptops and interacting with other buyers in the space.

Step 3: Assess mainstream market user traits

Now it gets tricky. This stage involved step 3–5 of the design thinking process. You need to identify the main aspects of the innovation that the mainstream market will identify and relate to. Now as opposed to the early adopters, this market lags behind and are not interested in the technical details of the innovation. They want to see social proof! They need to know the innovation is valuable and hear about it entering their daily lives before they invest time and attention in the innovation.

Step 4: Cross the ‘chasm’ using Parental Anchoring

Once you know the core features that early adopters love about your innovation, and know the social triggers that the mass market will be most swayed by, its time to create a model to help your innovation ‘cross the chasm’ and be picked up by the mainstream market users faster than ever before. This is done with ‘Parental Anchoring’.

Imagine the early adopters are your first born kids, now teenagers. They better understand complexity, and they want the in-depth information and the feeling that they are ‘getting in first’ or an exclusive group that has first access to your ideas. Now imagine the mainstream market as a young toddler. They cant grasp highly technical info, but the more the teenager makes hype about an idea, it seems exciting and they want to be involved to. You have to anchor their ‘learnings’ of this new innovation in an easy to understand format that relates to fun behaviours that they are already used to in their everyday life.

An example of Parental Anchoring

I created the game Bitcon to give everyday people the understanding of the core aspects of investing in the rollercoaster like ride that is Bitcoin. Why is this a good example of Parental Anchoring? It strips away all the technical information of the innovation and focuses on the core ideas: volatility of the market, the quick changes up and down, and the lack of value of the asset. It is effective because it wraps this education in a fun format that people are used to in their everyday lives: the format of a card game, created to incorporate the best elements of Uno, Buckethead, and Russian Roulette. This allows an innovation to spread to mainstream market users a lot faster than normal, and anchors their behaviour with the least resistance.

Try this model for yourself to spread innovations fast!