Description

Mobile phones are spreading ubiquitously across the planet. They are considered

a common manifestation of the latest phase of globalization, along with Chinese

consumer goods and Indian IT services. With more than three billion subscribers around

the world, mobile phones have out-diffused virtually every prior technology, whether TV

sets, radios, wrist watches, wallets, wireline phones, or bicycles, and have done so in the

past 25 years. Mobile phones are now used by about half of the world's population.

However, it is the baffling degree of variation in how they have been adopted in different

parts of the world and the wide range of explanations of the variation. In the emerging

world, mobile penetration rates vary substantially.

Diffusion processes evoke a variety of possible research questions; one might wonder

what drives growth, what will be the shape of an innovation's life-cycle curve, and what

is the relationship between individual adoption decisions and aggregate market growth?

These issues lead to significant implementation-related questions such as the influences

of marketing mix variables on the growth pattern of the industry and brand, the

interactions between growth processes in various countries wherein the firm has

presence, and the effect of competition on growth. Diffusion research is the branch of

marketing that aims to answer such questions through modeling the life cycle of new

products. Since its start in the 1960s, diffusion research has been, and still is, the only

modeling framework in marketing that is targeted at modeling the entire lifecycle course

of an innovation from the perspective of communications and consumer interactions.