It was the second half of 1992. I was a student of the finishing school of sales and marketing funded by soaps and detergents – otherwise called Unilever I was staying with a farmer in a village in Etah in the state of Uttar Pradesh along with another intern – Pankaj Seith who is today a good friend. This was the famous rural stint which was useful for a city dweller like me to get a closer look at people who represent a bulk of our consumers. During this 6 week stint we were to do social projects for the villages. A few of us were working on creating access roads for the remote village we lived in and to help inoculate cattle against foot and mouth disease. While we managed to get volunteers to help with the road making, the inoculation project was quite a disaster. It baffled me at that time as to why the villagers refused to allow their cattle to be inoculated despite having themselves lost cattle a year earlier to this disease. Even holding up a few examples of people in the village who were progressive enough to understand the benefits and do the inoculation didn’t seem to move the rest. I wish at that time someone had explained to me the diffusion of innovation theory developed by E.M. Rogers, a communication theorist at the University of New Mexico, in 1962. To know more about it listen to this story which I first heard in the Anecdotally Speaking Podcast. To Watch the full story in HD go to https://bit.ly/DiffIn #stories #storytelling #storiesatwork #businessstorytelling #storytelling #Innovation #Diffusionofinnovation #FindingTheRightTargetAudience #Diffusionofinnovation #EMRogers #Targetaudience #innovators #change #changemanagement #innovators #EarlyAdopters #EarlyMajority #LateMajority #Laggards For more #storiesatwork do subscribe to our YouTube channel which has two playlists – #StoryBank https://bit.ly/WStoryB and #LeaderSpeak https://bit.ly/WLeaderS You can also join our WhatsApp group to get copies of our videos. https://bit.ly/SW_WA_11
