Adaption process of innovations: A field study with students of the Cukurova University

Within this study, it was attempted to explain the diffusion and adoption of new products and determine the comparision of adopter categories of VCD films by the field study. Consumers were categorized into three groups as innovators, early majority and late majority in this study. For this classification, the scales tested and validated in the earlier studies were used. Using a questionnaire containing total 48 items, the data were collected from a selected sample of 289 undergraduate students. Since 1960s, it has been researched about diffusion and adoption of innovation.One of the main reasons of many researches is to find a solution to the failure of new products. Marketing managers want to find out consumer behavior in order to keep the image of their firms, to decrease the failure rate, and to reduce costs. That's why attitudes and behaviors of innovators and opinion leaders are important for the companies. Particularly, it is possible to attain other members of the social system by opinion leaders and consequently opinion seekers can be influenced by word of mouth communication. Innovators are so significant for marketers as they purchase new products at early stages of product life cycle and also recommend new products to other indivuduals as opinion leaders. Also many empirical studies have found that opinion leaders and innovators are key consumers affecting the diffusion and adoption of a new product. However, it is not easy for marketing managers to exert an influence upon opinion leaders and innovators for advising and giving information about new products to the rest of members of a social system. Hence, marketing managers prefer to use more mass media communication. Using mass media, they both want to affect target market directly and influence innovators and opinion leaders to access target market.VI Generally, innovators and opinion leaders have similiar personal traits. However, opinion leaders are not always included in early purchasers of a new productln spite of opinion leaders, innovators are ready to take- more risk. In most of the studies, opinion leaders have been included in early adopters not in innovators. But, it might be said that opinion leaders are similar to innovators with respect to income and education level, exposuring to media, social participation, and social mobility. As a result of this study, it was found significant differences among innovators, early majority and late majority with respect to some behavioral dimensions and demographic characteristics.The findings indicated that innovators prefer to walk in stores and look into VCD films, but on the contrary late adopters prefer to get advise of salespeople in the market. Innovators have greater exposure to mass media communication channels than the others and have a higher level of education than early majority and late majority. Also, innovators have superiority regarding the ownership of technological households. Based on these type of studies, it would be possible to categorize consumers as innovators, early majority and late majority and create different marketing strategies for these adopter groups. Keywords: Consumer Behavior, Diffusion of Innovation, Adoption of Innovation, Innovativeness, Opinion Leadership, Marketing Communication