New energy opinion leaders' lifestyles and media usage - applying data mining decision tree analysis for UNIDO - ICHET web site users

According to the innovation diffusion research, the innovators, opinion leaders, and diffusion agents play vital roles in promoting the acceptance of innovation. The innovators and opinion leaders must be able to cope with the high degree of uncertainty about an innovation and usually they have higher innovation-related media usage than the majority. Based on consumer behavior studies, lifestyle analysis could help researchers divide consumers into different lifestyle groups to understand and predict consumer behaviors. Lifestyle allows researchers to investigate consumers via their activities, interests and opinions instead of using demographic variables. The purpose of this research is to investigate how new energy innovators and opinion leaders' different lifestyles affect their new energy product adoption, and their media usage regarding new energy reports or promotion. In order to achieve the purposes listed above, the researchers need to locate and contact the potential innovators and opinion leaders in this field. Thus the researchers cooperate with UNIDO-ICHET to launch this survey. This cross-discipline online survey was formally launched from Aug 2005 to Oct 2006. The result of this survey successfully collected 2040 new energy innovators and opinion leaders' information. The researchers analyzed the data using SPSS statistics software and Data Mining decision tree analysis. Then the researchers divided new energy innovators into four groups: social-oriented, young modern, conservative, and show-off-oriented. They also analyzed which lifestyle groups are better targets for innovation agencies to launch innovation-related promotions or campaigns