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.
