News Feature on Opinion Leaders and Mavens in the Diffusion of Electric Cars By Alwin

During the early ninety’s, General Motors had created a prototype battery powered automobile in respond to California and Arizona state governments’ mandate. The governments required all automobile companies to have a minimum of ten percent of the total sales to be non-polluting cars. By doing so, the governments hope to decrease the smog levels in the major cities such as Los Angeles and Phoenix.

GM spent $2 billion on Research and Development and market for this new innovative technology. However, the sleek, lightweight, silent and yet powerful automobile, known as IMPACT, came with a poor battery life, which was limited to a range of 100 miles. The vehicle took approximately three to four hours for a full charged via a 220-volt electrical outlet.
GM marketing executives, with the aided by expert diffusion scholars, came out a marketing campaign to both cities when 150 prototype IMPACT were produced. With an overwhelming responds, only several hundreds of respondents, who were selected through questionnaire, to have a 30 minutes test-drive of the IMPACT.

GM marketing experts called these respondents mavens, who posses a high level of interest and expertise over specific products. Each maven was allowed to spend 30 minutes to ask questions with a GM automobile engineer after their test drives. After debriefed by the GM market researchers, the mavens are given an eight by ten inch color photograph and fifty two by three inch photograph of the IMPACT. The purpose was to promote IMPACT by using the word of mouth diffusion technique. The plan was a successful one.

However, due to the poor name of the automobile, the marketing experts changed the name to EV-1. Although EV-1 was quiet restricted due to the limitation of the mileage, many mavens are still keen to purchase this non-polluting, low cost of electricity automobile. But the interest of the consumers faded quickly over electric powered vehicles when other automobile companies beginning to market “hybrid” gas and electric powered vehicles.

After paying a huge lost, General Motors learned their lessons and put into another innovation works, an on-board global positioning system.

Retrieved from Rogers, E.M. (2003). Opinion Leaders and Mavens in the Diffusion of Electric Cars. In diffusion of innovations (pp. 87-89). New York: Free Press