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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

We need to work with something that gives more clues about how to proceed in the presence of real people with complex motives. However, since we do not have real live customers as yet—or at least, not very many of them—we are just going to have to make them up. Then, once we have their images in mind, we can let them guide us to developing a truly responsive approach to their needs. Target customer characterization is a formal process for making up these images, getting them out of individual heads and in front of a market development decision-making group. The idea is to create as many characterizations as possible, one for each different type of customer and application for the product. (It turns out that, as these start to accumulate, they begin to resemble one another so that, somewhere between twenty and fifty, you realize you are just repeating the same formulas with minor tweaks, and that in fact you have outlined eight to ten distinct alternatives.) Once we have built a basic library of possible target customer profiles, we can then apply a set of techniques to reduce these “data” into a prioritized list of desirable target market segment opportunities. The quotation marks around data are key, of course, because we are still operating in a low-data situation. We just have a better set of material to work with.

Charlie