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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

What then would go into making up the whole product? Consider the following:

Aruba to partner with, and eventually acquire, AirWave, a network management system that grew up managing Cisco routers and switches.

Active Directory from Microsoft, so partnering here also became a priority.

Aruba to partner with and eventually to directly purchase from Bradford a network operations control center

This requires special video codecs to supply, which Aruba turned to a company called Video Furnace.

This Aruba had to invent, and it has subsequently become a key differentiator in its product line.

(good news) there is no enemy fortifying the shore against invasion because (bad news) people have yet to discover there is anything there to defend.

They don’t say no, in other words; they just don’t say yes. Talk about extended sales cycles!

have a fixed amount of supplies (working capital)

The question is not whether someday someone will make a successful colony; the question is whether it will be them, or whether they will die in the attempt.

To cross the chasm, Lithium had to target a pragmatist enclave disaffected with the status quo. They found that enclave in tech support.

The core product here is a branded website that lets customers both ask and answer questions, lets them rate the quality of the answers, which over time allows the best answerers to emerge, garnering these providers the highest status awards.

they did have one thing going for them right out of the chute. The cost reduction of deflecting a call from a call center to a website is substantial—as much as ten

times.

here’s what Lithium did over and above that allowed them to cross the chasm

What does work for product managers, on the other hand, are tactical “whole product” alliances. These alliances have one and only one purpose:

Accelerate the formation of whole product infrastructure within a specific target market segment in support of a segment-specific compelling reason to buy.

Whole product alliances are readily initiated and managed at the product marketing manager level.

they can also be anticipated through the exercise of thinking through the whole product solution to the customer’s buying objective.

these are tactical alliances growing out of whole product needs,

Specialized offerings must focus intensely on what is core to their differentiation,

companies taking this path must look to leverage existing systems and players wherever they can.

economically aligned with, in this case, Rocket Fuel’s value proposition, but not able or willing to actively engage in a lot of partnering activities.

The key tactic here is to build very clean interfaces for accessing other systems and letting them access you—

there are peripheral partnering relationships that can grease the skids to accelerate adoption in your target market.

Targeted the “next two billion” Web users,

Described their specific niche in the next two billion users. Focused customer segment

Recruited two key mobile operators—

Leveraged their support to recruit two key device manufacturers—

get the ecosystem aligned both at the executive and the operating levels.

Fought to maintain a common core set of standards for the platform,

so that the end result was truly scalable at a global level.

Led a launch at the 2013 Mobile World Congress

CEOs, each of whom had signed a commitment to launch a Firefox-enabled device in at least one country.

Hardcore industry lobbying to realize Firefox as a standard, democratized browser...this is a strong example of effective strategic partnerships, aligning an industry to literally reshape the landscape

A key takeaway here is that the steps of market development outlined in this book structured their entire effort:

They began with a target customer

with a compelling reason to buy

They figured out the whole product and determined for that product that the operators and the OEM device manufacturers were the critical anchor partners.

They then went after partners who shared their interest in the next two billion, with franchise interests in developing economies,

“create the competition”

both operators and OEMs increasingly nervous such that they were ready to support the entry of a balancing force.

Finally, at no point did they try to make the story or the value proposition about themselves.

so people could buy in based on their own...

That is a true key to whole product manag...

For any company crossing the chasm, fostering the initial partnerships to create the whole product is the equivalent of seeding the value chain, getting it started.

To sum up, whole product definition followed by a strong program of tactical alliances to speed the development of the whole product infrastructure is the essence of assembling an invasion force for crossing the chasm.

The force itself is a function of actually delivering on the customer’s compelling reason to buy in its entirety.

any company that executes a whole product strategy competently has a high probability of mainstream market success.

Use the doughnut diagram to define—and then to communicate—the whole product.

Review the whole product to ensure it has been reduced to its minimal set.

Review the whole product from each participant’s point of view.