“An unbelievable transition in twenty years” – Rogers

Update | 12 - 15 September, 1987

Dr Everett Rogers is the Walter H Annenberg Professor of Communications at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA. He is best known for his pioneering work on the diffusion of innovations. He is also an old India hand, who has visited India frequently and undertaken several projects in India. Dr Rogers was in Bombay recently. VINITA BALI, marketing manager, Hindustan Cocoa Products, and NARENDRA LALJANI, Business Manager, IEL Limited, interviewed Rogers on behalf of UPDATE on subjects ranging from the Green Revolution and the changing rural scene, to television and the diffusion theory. Excerpts:

You have been visiting India frequently for the last 23 years, and you’ve been associated with a number of projects in the country. What do you consider as your most significant contribution here?

I think it was the studies I did in the period from’64 to ’69, in villages in three parts of India -- Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. These were surveys of thousands of farmers on the diffusion of agricultural innovations. I think the results directly contributed in a small way to the success of the Green Revolution. We found out some things about the realities of the Green Revolution at its early stages, and the findings were directly fed into the ministry of agriculture and the International Rice Research Institute.

As a specific example, we found evidence that while farmers liked the new rice varieties, partly because they were doubling and tripling yields, they didn’t like to eat them. People didn’t like the taste. We reported this to the IRRI. At that time, the IRRI did not breed for taste -- it could have made their breeding programme much more complicated. Today, they do, which is a sign that we were right after all. I guess what we were really doing was giving feedback from the farmer level to the government officials and technicians who were engineering the Green Revolution.

How did farmers in India react to technological advances in agriculture, compared with your experience of farmers elsewhere in the world?

The first research I did was in lowa, and in Ohio. American farmers were literate; they were beginning to see faring as a business. One of their main criteria in adopting an agricultural innovation was the cost and the return. I started doing diffusion studies very soon after that in India. Illiteracy was an important variable -- may be 60-80 percent of the farmers were illiterate. But radio was just coming in --the transistor radio revolution had just happened about the same time, and radio was the most important means through which external information was getting through. The difference between American farmers and Indian farmers at that stage was that the diffusion process was slower and economic criteria were probably less important. In a way, we were seeing the commercialisation of Indian agriculture. Farmers were producing less for their own consumption; they were producing increasingly for sale. A very big shift from subsistence to commercialised agriculture was taking place. This also led to many complex problems. The farmer who learnt about the new rice varieties went to the warehouse to buy them, but there were none, they were all gone. So a black market began for the rice varieties, with extra high prices….similarly for fertilisers. So the strong motivation of farmers to get into the Green Revolution was causing complex strains and discontinuities with the supply side of agriculture which was coming up slowly and couldn’t expand at the same rate.

Over the years, what changes have you seen in rural India?

In the mid 60’s an Indian student, a doctoral scholar, gathered data for his dissertation in two villages in Punjab near Ludhiana. I returned to these villages three years ago, with him. It was an earth-shattering experience. These farmers were just very innovative, very entrepreneurial. Twenty years ago, the most respected villager had lived in a very humble house. In 1984, he was living in a two-storeyed brick house, with a refrigerator. As we went in, we couldn’t believe this was his house. The first thing he did was to offer us beer out of his refrigerator - that was mind blowing.

Moving away from agriculture, what are your impressions of the media in India?

Well, they’ve changed a great deal. There’s been tremendous change in media audiences. The rise of television in the 80’s is an unbelievable thing to me – I think that’s the biggest change – the degree to which television reaches, by no means everybody, but such a sizeable audience. That offers new possibilities for public opinion formation, for education, for being well informed about news, events, and of course, for entertainment, that just weren’t there until the 1980’s.

What about the role of radio?

It was expanding very much, thanks to the transistor, an electronics breakthrough, although there were still plenty of those monstrous old vacuum tube radios in Indian villages at that time. Twenty years ago, we – experts in communications – thought that radio would be a magic multiplier for development. That assumes that useful information of a development kind would be conveyed over radio. And India more than most countries has tried to make that happen through its state controlled radio system, but I guess the disappointment has been that the content has turned out to be mainly entertainment, not very much development.

We were talking about the advent of television. Based on your experience in other countries, what do you think television is likely to do to other media?

In general, it decreases the number of hours spent on the print media. So it’s a time shift, partly because of the high degree of television watching. For instance, in America, the average television set in a household is on 7 hours a day, and it creeps up a few more minutes every year. It specially seems to cut into book reading. The average American family buys only 2 books a year. The average Japanese family buys 30, just to give you an idea of how little reading we do.

What about Latin America, where you’ve done a lot of work? What has happened to media in those countries?

It has had some similar effects, although television came in slower, partly for reasons of cost of TV sets relative to incomes, which is a logical economic explanation. Mexico, along with Brazil, would be the two countries that have had the most of television. It has cut into cinema seat sales. Increasingly, the film industry in Latin America, has in essence become a film television industry, with some of the same talent….something similar is beginning to happen, I think, in India.

The other thing that happened in Mexico and Brazil -- they are two spectacular cases -- is that in each country, a television monopoly arose. There’s also a government broadcasting system which has fairly dull programmes -- with may be 10-11 percent of the TV audience – but the majority of people watch this private monopoly which is by far the most powerful economic and political force in the country. In fact the most powerful person in Mexico is not the president of the country; it’s the president of this television company. The most powerful person in Brazil is definitely not the president of Brazil; it’s the president of the TV network.

You’re currently involved with the research project on “Hum Log” in India. What are your observations on Indian television, and what is the kind of work you’re doing?

I think that the nature of Indian television programming has changed tremendously in the years since “Hum Log” began. I take the beginning of “Hum Log” in 1984 as a turning point in Indian television. Not just soap operas – although that has been a very noticeable change – but a whole new set of 13-15 different programmes that are attracting large audiences. These are very attractive programmes, so attractive that it’s one of the main motivations to get a TV set, or else to get access to a TV set.

In the villages we studied in the “Hum Log” survey we encountered a number of families who had just purchased a TV set in the last years, and they were great respondents to tell why … in every case they had seen television in someone else’s home and that made them really want television, and so they spent, for their incomes, a lot of money to buy – typically – a black and white television set …

Have you noticed any differences between urban and rural viewership habits?

Very big differences. In urban areas, it is almost impossible to find anybody who didn’t watch “Hum Log”, which is not what we expected.

In villages, it’s quite a different story. At least 50-70 percent of our respondents in villages didn’t watch any “Hum Log”. They knew there was such a thing and at the most they saw an episode in somebody else’s home.

Do you think television has adverse effects also, as a source of social tension – Maggi Noodles being advertised in rural areas where people can’t get a square meal?

The biggest negative effect of television which I’ve seen especially in Latin America has been the encouragement of rural migration. Both ads and programmes show middle class urban settings, and the general message the viewer must get is life is better in urban areas …. so I’m worried most about over-urbanisation.

My second worry, which is close to the one you mentioned, is that inevitably television, especially in its commercial forms, conveys an idea of consumerism. Advertising by its nature encourages consumerism, and that can happen at a rate that would cause frustration and tension – when people want these consumer products but don’t have the incomes to get them.

Turning specifically to your theory of diffusion of innovation, what is the predictive value in marketing terms of the theory?

The main contribution of the theory is in two things. One, in using adoptive categories as market segments and targeting messages which fit those segments at a particular point in time in the diffusion of new products. The other main predictive usefulness is at the level of the individual passing through the innovation decision process, going towards adoption from knowledge. We know that the mass media can create awareness and sometimes information and knowledge, but ultimately, for most individuals, they have to turn to somebody else who’s already using the product, somebody else much like them. What one is trying to engineer is person A talking to person B about one’s product and saying something favourable about it.

Can the process really be engineered in marketing terms?

Only up to a point. I think you could influence it a little, urge it along, but can’t buy it. It’s unpurchaseable.