The User Imagery Adoption Test
Adoption stalls on who owns the product, not what it does — audit your user imagery before you scale.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 91%
People default to habit and social copying, so the identity of current users is a stronger adoption driver than any feature or ROI calculation. If early adopters look weird, smug or culty, they actively repel the mainstream — a phenomenon Sutherland calls user imagery. The framework is a diagnostic: audit who visibly owns your product, and fix the imagery before spending more on rational persuasion.
Origin
Sutherland's synthesis of behavioural science defaults (habit and social copying) with marketing's user-imagery concept. Evidence cited: an AI study on heat-pump adoption, the Ford/Edison electric car of the 1900s stereotyped as a woman's car, and Google Glass seeded to developers.
Core principles
- 01Humans do not utility-maximise; they run two defaults — do what I did before (habit) and do what everyone else is doing (social copying).
- 02Social copying is rational: an organism that learned everything from first principles would eat a lot of poisonous berries.
- 03The first adopters of any innovative product tend to be slightly weird, and weird people do not confer the reassurance of social norms.
- 04Marketers are outliers — high in openness to experience — while the majority of the population is driven by habit and social norms and wants to fit in.
- 05Evangelism can backfire: enthusiastic advocates can read as a cult, which repels rather than attracts.
- 06Rational arguments (savings, environmental benefit) reliably lose to local social proof.
How to run it
- 1
Audit your current user imagery
Ask what the market believes about the kind of person who owns your product, in the market's own words — not your ICP deck. This is the story a non-buyer tells about buyers.
Pro tip Read the comments under articles about your category. That is where user imagery is stated out loud.
Watch out Electric car sceptics did not object to the cars; they objected to the imagined 'smug environmental tosser' who drives one.
- 2
Check whether the imagery repels the next segment
Determine whether that user image confers social reassurance to a mainstream buyer or marks the product as belonging to an out-group. Anything that reads as weird, smug, or a cult is an adoption tax.
Pro tip Sutherland's own air-fryer evangelism is the cautionary case: when six enthusiasts in an audience of 500 shout their love, the other 494 conclude these people are in a cult.
- 3
Correct your seeding population
Seed the product with visible owners the mainstream aspires to resemble, rather than with the group most likely to accept it early. Who you give it to first is a marketing decision, not a logistics one.
Pro tip Edward Jenner's marketing coup for smallpox vaccination was getting the British royal family to vaccinate their children.
Watch out Google Glass launched too soon and gave the glasses to developers — with the best will in the world, not the people you want walking around your bar wearing them.
- 4
Engineer local social proof, not rational arguments
Concentrate adoption geographically or within a network so prospects see people like them, near them, already using it. Local density beats the economic case.
Pro tip Sutherland cites AI analysis of heat-pump adoption: neither environmental benefit nor cost savings moved people — three heat pumps on your street did.
Watch out Economists find this maddening and will argue neighbours' behaviour should be irrelevant. It is not how people work.
- 5
Strip the moralising out of the positioning
Remove any framing that implies buyers are virtuous and non-buyers are not. Sell status, novelty, coolness and pleasure — the actual reasons most people adopt new technology.
Pro tip Sutherland wants solar panels not to save the planet but to say at a picnic that his car runs on the sun. Adoption of new technology is a peacock's tail: it is showing off.
Watch out Imbuing a product with a holier-than-thou aura creates resentment and is a huge obstacle to adoption, even when almost no owners actually hold the virtuous motive.
In the wild
In the first decade of the 20th century Ford and Edison collaborated on an electric car that, by accounts Sutherland has read, was genuinely good — quiet, strong acceleration, decent range and speed. Because it was quiet, fume-free and needed no hand-cranking, it became popular with women and was stereotyped as a woman's car, while the farm boys and racers used gasoline.
→ User imagery, not the technology, killed it — a full century before the identical dynamic reappeared around modern EVs.
An AI investigation into what would drive adoption of solar panels and heat pumps tested the rational levers: environmental benefit and money saved. Neither was the answer.
→ The single most persuasive factor was that three people on your street already have one — local social proof beat every economic argument.
Google launched Glass early and gave the units to developers. Sutherland — who says he would have bought one even at the $1,000 launch price — argues the seeding population set the imagery.
→ The user imagery was not good, and a product with real utility as a heads-up display never crossed the chasm.
Common mistakes
Assuming the buyer is a utility-maximiser
The rational levers — savings, payback period, environmental benefit — reliably lose to habit and social copying. Building the campaign on the spreadsheet case wastes the budget.
Marketers generalising from themselves
People in marketing are very high in openness to experience and keen to stand out; most of the population is low in openness and wants to fit in. You must continually remind yourself that you are an outlier.
Over-evangelising
Loud advocates make the product look like a cult. Enthusiasm from visibly odd users actively annoys the mainstream rather than reassuring it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and growth leads on a technically strong innovation that is stalling with mainstream buyers despite good reviews and a solid economic case.
Not ideal for
Products bought invisibly or purely on spec (back-end infrastructure, commodity inputs) where ownership signals nothing socially.
From the transcript
“what killed it interestingly user imagery”
“products tend to be slightly weird okay and weird people do not confer the reassurance of kind of social norms uh in the way that…”
“developers now let with the best will of the world developers probably aren't the world's like coolest people”
“no the single thing that would persuade people to have more heat pumps is if three people on their street have a heat pump”
“keen to stand out very keen to be distinctive the majority of the population are much lower on openness to experience they're much more driven…”
From the episode
What most people miss about marketing
Rory Sutherland (Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, author)