From the article: "The worst of the harbingers? Repeat customers, those with a tendency to purchase a product like Diet Crystal Pepsi not just once, but over and over again. These customers really, really like the products that end up failing. Harbingers with a history of making four or more repeat purchases of a failed product are nearly twice as likely as other customers to buy another product that fails."
So no, it doesn't seem like it's as simple as early adopters or novelty-seekers.
That might explain that they're not really novelty seekers but it doesn't negate the point that they're just early adopters. The article goes to some lengths to make these customers look bad but do they also buy products that later succeed? The article doesn't clearly say.
Moreover, How do you distinguish an early adopter from a harbinger? I'd argue that there's very little in this article (as presented) that helps with that.
The stats (as they are quoted here) are just exactly what you would expect to see if you looked at early adopters.
New products typically fail. If you are a consistent early adopter, you will buy a lot more failures than someone who sticks to tried-and-tested products.
If anything, "twice as many" is lower than I would have thought. In my opinion, this suggests that early adopters are rare - that there isn't a novelty-seeker type of person who goes around trying new products for the sake of it.
What they should be measuring is slightly different than this. If these people buy a new product, does that make the product more likely to fail than it would otherwise? (Given that the product is likely to fail anyway)
As I've understood, this stricter statistic is not seen in the article. Even if we could identify people like that, I would put those people into the category of "temporarily unlucky early adopters" and would not expect them to have predictive power.
With that in mind, the conclusion of the article seems nonsensical.
This is a customer group that would be really good for an online service.
For a physical retail store, items that are well liked by a 0.1% of population are a failure - since they carry much of the same fixed costs as a similar item liked by 40% of population, and extra variety costs them; and the best target audience of a physical retail store is "everyone who lives close enough" or "everyone of socal demographic X who lives close enough".
An online store can serve only that 0.1% audience based on their flavour preference. If there are a million people worldwide who really like Diet Crystal Pepsi? Great, there's a lot of money to be made on that product - even if it's unprofitable to stock it in Walmart and expect that a Diet Crystal Pepsi fan will wander in today.
So no, it doesn't seem like it's as simple as early adopters or novelty-seekers.