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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

although they valued the material in the book, it really didn’t tell them anything they didn’t know already. Rather it captured what had been for them scattered intuitions and rueful learnings and put them into a coherent set of frameworks that could be used for future decision making.

Thus the book left the marketing department and began to find its way to the engineering section, where a whole lot of readers claimed it was the first marketing book they didn’t throw away after reading the early chapters.

It turns out that Crossing the Chasm is at heart a B2B market development model. It can be applied to B2C, at times quite effectively, but at the end of the day, it is not normally the best model to use.

Why haven’t we been able to apply these same skills to high tech? And what is it going to take for us to finally get it right?

Our default model for how to develop a high-tech market is almost—but not quite—right. As a result, our marketing ventures, despite normally promising starts, drift off course in puzzling ways, eventually causing unexpected and unnerving gaps in sales revenues, and sooner or later leading management to undertake some desperate remedy.

the company crossing the chasm must scurry to find its new home. Until it does, it will be vulnerable to all kinds of predators.

This book is unabashedly about and written specifically for marketing within high-tech enterprises.

The key in all this is crossing the chasm—performing the acts that allow the first shoots of that mainstream market to emerge.

One of the most important lessons about crossing the chasm is that the task ultimately requires achieving an unusual degree of company unity during the crossing period.

In academic terms, such change-sensitive products are called discontinuous or disruptive innovations.

The contrasting term, continuous or sustaining innovations, refers to the normal upgrading of products that does not require us to change behavior.

As a consumer, you don’t have to change your ways in order to take advantage of these improvements.

the innovation demands significant changes by not only the consumer but also the infrastructure of supporting businesses that provide complementary products and services to round out the complete offer. That is how and why such innovations come to be called discontinuous.

The groups are distinguished from each other by their characteristic response to a discontinuous

Each group represents a unique psychographic profile—a combination of psychology and demographics that makes its marketing responses different from those of the other groups.

Innovators pursue new technology products aggressively.

This is because technology is a central interest in their life, regardless of what function it is performing.

winning them over at the outset of a marketing campaign is important nonetheless, because their endorsement reassures the other players in the marketplace that the product could in fact work.

Early adopters, like innovators, buy into new product concepts very early in their life cycle, but unlike innovators, they are not technologists.

Rather they are people who find it easy to imagine, understand, and appreciate the benefits of a new technology, and to relate these pote...

Because early adopters do not rely on well-established references in making these buying decisions, preferring instead to rely on their own intuition and vision, they are core to opening up any high-tech market segment.

The early majority share some of the early adopter’s ability to relate to technology, but ultimately they are driven by a strong sense of practicality.

They want to see well-established references before investing substantially.

Whereas people in the early majority are comfortable with their ability to handle a technology product, should they finally decide to purchase it, members of the late majority are not. As a result, they wait until something has become an established standard, and even then they want to see lots of support and tend to buy, therefore, from large, well-established companies.

Courting its favor is highly profitable indeed, for while profit margins decrease as the products mature, so do the selling costs, and virtually all the R&D costs have been amortized.

Finally there are the laggards. These people simply don’t want anything to do with new technology, for any of a variety of reasons, some personal and some economic.

From a market development perspective laggards are generally regarded as not worth pursuing on any other basis.

technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that community.

the way to develop a high-tech market is to work the curve left to right, focusing first on the innovators, growing that market segment, then moving on to the early adopters, growing that segment, and so on, to the early majority, late majority, and even to the laggards.

Thus the endorsement of innovators becomes an important tool for developing a credible pitch to the early adopters, that of the early adopters to the early majority, and so on.

It is important to maintain momentum in order to create a bandwagon effect that makes it natural for the next group to want to buy in.

You need to take advantage of your day in the sun before the next day renders you obsolete.

a gap. This symbolizes the dissociation between the two groups—that is, the difficulty any group will have in accepting a new product if it is presented in the same way as it was to the group to its immediate left.

It is a gap that occurs when a hot technology product cannot be readily translated into a major new benefit

the key to getting beyond the enthusiasts and winning over a visionary is to show that the new technology enables some strategic leap forward, something never before possible, which has an intrinsic value and appeal to the nontechnologist.

If the marketing effort is unable to find that compelling application, then market development stalls with the innovators, and the future of the product falls through this first crack in the bell curve.

When a product reaches this point in the market development, it must be made increasingly easier to adopt in order to continue being successful. If this does not occur, the transition to the late majority will stall.

Instead, they bemoan that the product has become a commodity when in fact it is the experience of the product that has been commoditized.

the real news is the deep and dividing chasm that separates the early adopters from the early majority.

What the early adopter is buying, as we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 2, is some kind of change agent.

By being the first to implement this change in their industry, the early adopters expect to get a jump on the competition, whether from lower product costs, faster time to market, more complete customer service, or some other comparable business advantage.

Being the first, they also are prepared to bear with the inevitable bugs and glitches that accompany any innovation just coming to market.

By contrast, the early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations.

Because of these incompatibilities, early adopters do not make good references for the early majority. And because of the early majority’s concern not to disrupt their organizations, good references are critical to their buying decisions.

The only suitable reference for an early majority customer, it turns out, is another member of the early majority, but no upstanding member of the early majority will buy without first having consulted with several suitable references.

In sum, when promoters of high-tech products try to make the transition from a market base made up of visionary early adopters to penetrate the next adoption segment, the pragmatist early majority, they are effectively operating without a reference base and without a support base within a market that is highly reference oriented and highly support oriented.

falter and then fail. Here’s why: What the company staff interpreted as a ramp in sales leading smoothly “up the curve” was in fact an initial blip—what we will be calling the early market—and not the first indications of an emerging mainstream market.

The company failed because its managers were unable to recognize that there is something fundamentally different between a sale to an early adopter and a sale to the early majority, even when the company name on the check reads the same.

defining marketing is not particularly difficult: It simply means taking actions to create, grow, maintain, or defend markets.

market, which we will define, for the purposes of high tech, as: • a set of actual or potential customers • for a given set of products or services • who have a common set of needs or wants, and • who reference each other when making a buying decision.