January 6th, 2023, Rishad Dsouza
Just over one in ten Britons (11%) are early adopters of technology products, data from YouGov Profiles shows. Early adopters of tech products in this piece refer to those who are either “actively on the look-out to buy new technology devices and services” or “are always keen to use new technology products as soon as they enter the market”.
But targeting this audience in brand messaging might be an efficient strategy for innovative tech brands to reach wider audiences as this group are very likely to “recommend things for people to try”. Seven in ten early tech adopters in Britain express an inclination towards making recommendations to other people (72%). By comparison, only 48% of all Britons say they like to recommend things for people to try.
Does this tendency materialise in practice? Indeed, YouGov BrandIndex data reveals that early tech adopters are noticeably likelier than the overall population to have spoken about leading smartphone brands with their friends and family. This can be tracked using the WOM Exposure metric, which looks at the share of people who have spoken about a particular brand with others in the past two weeks.
For instance, over the last half year, a fifth of the overall British population have spoken about the iPhone brand (20%). This share rises to 24% of Britons who are early tech adopters. iPhone also over-indexes in the share of early tech adopters who would recommend the brand (42% vs 34% of the overall British population). Similar differences in these two metrics are noticed for many of Britain’s top smartphone brands.
So who are early tech adopters?
Unsurprisingly, early tech adopters are a significantly younger cohort.
Gen Z and millennials make up three-fifths of British early tech adopters (60%) even though they form only 38% of the overall population.
Men are over-represented in the group of early tech adopters, constituting seven-tenths of it in Britain (69%), where they make up 49% of the overall population. Women make up less than a third of the early tech adopters’ unit (31% vs 51% of the overall population).
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Methodology: YouGov Profiles is based on continuously collected data and rolling surveys, rather than from a single limited questionnaire. Profiles data is nationally representative and weighted by age, gender, education, region, and race. Learn more about Profiles.
Image credit: Eddy Billard on Unsplash