Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

by Geoffrey A. Moore

If two people buy the same product for the same reason but have no way they could reference each other, they are not part of the same market. That is, if I sell an oscilloscope for monitoring heartbeats to a doctor in Boston and the identical product for the same purpose to a doctor in Zaire, and these two doctors have no reasonable basis for communicating with each other, then I am dealing in two different markets. Similarly, if I sell an oscilloscope to a doctor in Boston and then go next door and sell the same product to an engineer working on a sonar device, I am also dealing in two different markets. In both cases, the reason we have separate markets is that the customers could not have referenced each other.