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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

A product with an uncertain position is very difficult to buy.

Your R&D will be all over the map.

You won’t be able to recruit partners and allies,

because they won’t be sure enough about your goals to make any meaningful commitments.

You are not likely to get financing from anybody with experience.

you do not have a clear—that is, investable—marketing strategy.

The key is to define your position based on the target segment you intend to dominate and the value proposition you intend to dominate it with.

This is the who for and what for positioning statement that resonates with visionaries and kicks off the early market competition.

you also want to foreshadow your mainstream market future, leveraging the competition and ...

Here is a proven formula for getting all this down into two short sentences. Try it out on your own company and one of its key products. Just fill in the blanks:

Now what is often interesting about writing a statement like this is not what you write down but what you have to give up.

Wouldn’t it have been better in both cases to have included extra value statements for a bigger effect?

The answer here is an emphatic no.

the goal of positioning is to create and ...

inside the target custom...

That’s all the space you get for your primary differentiation statement.

If you don’t make the choice to fill the space with a single attribute, then the market will do it for you.

don’t count on it to...

One final point on claims before moving on to other issues: The statement of position is ...

the kind of evidence that is needed evolves over the course of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle.

that pragmatists are more interested in the market’s response to a product than in the product itself.

What is particularly awkward for a high-tech company making this transition is that for the first time the major sources of desired evidence are not directly under its control.

It is a matter of other people—theoretically disinterested third parties—voting to endorse your product...

In sum, to the pragmatist buyer, the most powerful evidence of leadership and likelihood of competitive victory is market share. In the absence of definitive numbers here, pragmatists will look to the quality and number of partners and allies you have assembled in your

camp, and their degree of demonstrable commitment to your cause.

The message that will resonate now is much more likely to be “Look at this hot new market.”

This message typically consists of a description of the emerging new market, anchored by a new approach to a problem stubbornly resistant to conventional solutions, fed by an emerging set of partners and allies, each supplying a part of the whole product puzzle, to the satisfaction of an increasingly visible and growing set of customers.

entrepreneurial companies

it gives them a credibility that they cannot achieve on their own.

Their product does not even have to be the centerpiece of the whole product—it just has to be an indispensable component, as was ATI’s GPU (graphics processing unit) to the Microsoft Xbox 360, or the ARM...