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a niche book from an unknown author addressed to the somewhat esoteric challenges of marketing high-tech products.
But the more interesting question might be, Why was the book so successful?
First of all, it turned out that the metaphor of the chasm and the recommendations for how to cross it struck a deep chord among experienced high-tech managers.
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.
so a revised edition was published, keeping the arguments largely intact but substituting 1990s companies for their 1980s predecessors, further affirming the author’s belief that chasms are a perennial feature of the tech sector’s landscape.
my approach has been to preserve the fabric of the original book.
what I have allowed myself to do is add two appendices.
The first is a short recap of the argument of the book which followed Crossing the Chasm, namely Inside the Tornado, the goal of which was to flesh out in full the Technology Adoption Life Cycle end to end from the early market, the chasm, and the bowling alley, on to the tornado, Main Street, and post-adoption category maturity.
to put crossing the chasm itself into its b...
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It turns out that Crossing the Chasm is at heart a B2B market development model.
the Four Gears has proved more useful for digital entrepreneurs building consumer businesses. So that is the topic addressed in the second appendix.
High-tech innovation and marketing expertise are two cornerstones of the U.S. strategy for global competitiveness.
If we cannot at least learn to predictably and successfully bring high-tech products to market, our countermeasures against the onslaught of commoditizing globalization will falter, placing our entire standard of living in jeopardy.
we may see ourselves being outmanufactured, but not outmarketed.
even after we have lost an entire category of goods to offshore competition, we remain the experts in marketing these goods to U.S. consumers.
Why haven’t we been able to apply these same skills to high tech? And what is it going to take fo...
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To be specific, the point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation.
crossing this chasm must be the primary focus of any long-term high-tech
tech marketing plan.
It is an extremely difficult transition for reasons that will be summarized in the opening chapters of this book.
guiding principles.
Chapters 3 through 7 set forth the principles necessary to guide high-tech ventures during this period of great risk.
primarily on marketing,
Conclusion that leaving the chasm behind requires significant changes throughout ...
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additional new strategies in the areas of finance, organizational ...
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The problem, since these techniques are antithetical to each other, is that you need to decide which one—fad or trend—you are dealing with before you start.
start with a fad, exploit it for all it was worth, and then turn it into a trend.
that is in essence what high-tech marketin...
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as a fad—something with no known market value or purpose but with “great properties” that generate a lot of enthusiasm within an “in crowd” of ...
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if a value proposition is discovered that can be predictably delivered to a targetable set of customers at a reasonable price—then a new mainstream market segment forms,
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.
It is a time not for dashing and expensive
gestures but rather for careful plans and cautiously rationed resources—
to focus everyone on pursuing a high-probability course of action and making as f...
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One of the functions of this book, therefore—and perhaps its most important one—is to open up the logic of marketing decision making during this period so that everyone on the management tea...
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you want to be the first one on your block with an electric car, you are apt to be an innovator or an early adopter.
It turns out our attitude toward technology adoption becomes significant—at least in a marketing sense—any time we are introduced to products that require us to change our current mode of behavior or to modify other products and services we rely on.
change-sensitive products
disruptive inno...
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Disruptive innovation here refers to disrupting customer behaviors, as opposed to disruptive in an industry with an innovative business model, process, or way your business operates that is a competitive advantage with respect to customer value
For example, when Warby Parker promises you better-looking eyeglasses, that is a continuous innovation.
the Samsung were a 3-D TV, it would be incompatible with normal viewing, requiring you to don special glasses to get the special effects. This would be a discontinuous innovation because you would have to change your normal TV-viewing behavior.
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.
Innovators pursue new technology products aggressively.
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 potential benefits to their other concerns.
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 are content to wait and see how other people are making out before they buy in themselves.
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.
The first is between the innovators and the early adopters.
hot technology product cannot be readily translated into a major new benefit—
Major benefit relative to switching costs
Take virtual reality, for example.
