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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

First problem: The company simply has no expertise in bringing a product to market. It raises insufficient capital for the effort, hires inexperienced sales and marketing people, tries to sell the product through an inappropriate channel of distribution, promotes in the wrong places and in the wrong ways, and in general fouls things up. Remedying this kind of situation is not as hard as it may seem, provided the participants in the company are still communicating and cooperating with each other, and everyone is willing to scale back their expectations several notches. The basis for reform is the principle that winning at marketing more often than not means being the biggest fish in the pond. If we are very small, then we must search out a very small pond, a target market segment that fits our size. To qualify as a “real pond,” as we also noted before, its members must be aware of themselves as a group, that is, it must constitute a self-referencing market segment, so that when we establish a leadership position with some of its members, they will get the word out—quickly and economically—to the rest. Of course, no single pond of a size we can dominate in the short term is large enough to provide a sustaining market for the long term. Sooner or later, we have to expand into adjacent ponds. Or, to shift the metaphor, we need to reframe our tactics in the context of a “bowling pin” strategy, where one targets a given segment not just because one can “knock it over” but becaus...