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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

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. The problem they address is the one we will address, and the budget that is allocated to them represents the money we as the new entrant are going to preempt. To earn the right to this budget, 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. Their very existence gives credibility to the notion that now is the time to embrace this new discontinuity. Our intent here is to acknowledge their technology but to differentiate from them by virtue of our own segment-specific focus.