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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

Develop the whole product relationships slowly, working from existing instances of cooperation toward a more formalized program.

With large partners, try to work from the bottom up; with small ones, from the top down.

The goal in either case is to work as close as possible to where decisions that affect the customer actually get made.

Once formalized relationships are in place, use them as openings for communication only.

If you are working with very large partners, focus your energy on establishing relationships at the district sales office level and watch out for wasting time and effort with large corporate staffs. Conversely, if you are working with small partners, be sensitive to their limited resources and do everything you can to leverage your company to work to their advantage.

Finally, do not be surprised to discover that the most difficult partner to manage is your own

company.

The fundamental rule of engagement is that any force can

defeat any other force—if it can define the battle.

Well, in the case of crossing the chasm, one of the key things a pragmatist customer insists on seeing is viable competition.

Unfortunately, where there is no competition, there is no market.

we need to rethink the significance of competition as it relates to crossing the chasm.

Resistance has been a function of inertia growing out of commitment to the status quo, fear of risk, or lack of a compelling reason to buy.

Our goal in the early market has been to enlist visionary sponsors to help overcome this resistance. Their competition, in turn, has come from others within their own company, pragmatists who are vying with visionaries for dollars to fund projects.

Early market, enthusiasts and visionaries

The competition takes place at the level of corporate agenda, not at the level of competing products.

That’s how competitions work in the early market. It is not at all how they work in the mainstream,

In the pragmatist’s domain, competition is defined by comparative evaluations of products and vendors within a common category.

both established competition and an established leader, for that is a signal that the market has matured sufficiently to support a reasonable whole product infrastructure around an identified centerpiece.

Creating the competition is the single most important marketing communication decision made in the battle to enter the mainstream.

It begins with positioning your product within a buying category that already has some established credibility with the pragmatist buyers.

That category should be populated with other reasonable buying choices, ideally ones with which the pra...

your goal is to position your product as the indisputably cor...

So, how can you avoid selecting a self-serving or irrelevant competitive set?

The key is to focus in on the values and concerns of the pragmatists, not the visionaries.

Crossing the chasm, in this context, represents a transition from product-based to market-based values.

You develop an early market by demonstrating a strong technology advantage and converting it to product credibility,

you develop a mainstream market by demonstrating a market leadership advantage and converting it to company credibility.

Crossing the chasm requires moving from an environment of support among the visionaries back into one of skepticism among the pragmatists.

To sum up, it is the market-centric value system—supplemented (but not superseded) by the product-centric one—that must be the basis for the value profile of the target customers when crossing the chasm.

creating the competition involves using two competitors as beacons so that the market can locate your company’s unique value proposition.

The first of these two competitors we will call the market alternative. This is a vendor that the target customer has been buying from for years.

we are going to use a disruptive innovation to address a stubbornly problematic limitation in the traditional offer.

The second reference competitor we will call the product alternative. This is a company that is also harnessing the same disruptive innovation we are—or at least close to it—and is positioning itself like us as a technology leader.

Our intent here is to acknowledge their technology but to differentiate from them by virtue of our own segment-specific focus.

SharePoint represented the viable market alternative while Dropbox represented the viable product alternative.

All Box had to do was position itself at the intersection—Dropbox’s ease of use meets SharePoint’s enterprise standards. Best of both worlds.

The two alternatives called out in this diagram are your reference competitors.

as its market alternative, it makes clear that it is going after the same use cases and the same budget inside the enterprise.

its product alternative, it makes clear that its disruptive innovation i...

by thoughtful use of reference competitors, what they do not have to struggle with is explaining their value proposition.

There really is no market alternative out there. That is to say, there is no people mover budget to target.

And on the product side, there were no other companies leveraging this kind of disruptive technology in other market segments, so again, no way to cross-reference to success elsewhere.

Segway was all by itself, and that is not a good place to be when you are trying to cross the chasm.

the company did have a clear product alternative—the other electric vehicles on the market, the most successful of which to date has been the Tesla.

it had no market alternative.

There was no budget to repurpo...

If you try out this exercise of choosing the competition, and have trouble finding either a single, clear market alternative, or a credible second vendor leveraging your type of disruptive technology, this is a clue. It means that you are probably not ready to cross the chasm.

Chasm crossing requires a single target beachhead segment, and in that segment, there needs to exist already the budget dollars to buy your offer.

Choosing your market alternative wisely is the solution to this problem.

You need to make clear to everyone involved that a technology shift is under way here and that old solutions simply cannot hope to keep up.