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February 21 - April 14, 2018
the key to getting beyond the enthusiasts and winning over a visionary is to show that the new technology enables some strategic leap forward, something never before possible, which has an intrinsic value and appeal to the nontechnologist.
The key issue now—transitioning from the early to the late majority—has to do with lingering residual demands on the end user to be technologically competent.
they bemoan that the product has become a commodity when in fact it is the experience of the product that has been commoditized.
early adopters do not make good references for the early majority.
innovators are better known as technology enthusiasts or just techies, whereas the early adopters are the visionaries.
Visionaries are not looking for an improvement; they are looking for a fundamental breakthrough.
The key point is that, in contrast with the technology enthusiast, a visionary focuses on value not from a system’s technology per se but rather from the strategic leap forward such technology can enable.
It is important, therefore, in creating the phases of the visionary’s project to build in milestones that lend themselves to this sort of product spin-off.
At best, the entrepreneurial company secures a few pilot projects, but as schedules continue to slip, the visionary’s position in the organization weakens, and support for the project is eventually withdrawn, despite a lot of customized work, with no usable customer reference gained.
To look more closely into these values, if the goal of visionaries is to take a quantum leap forward, the goal of pragmatists is to make a percentage improvement—incremental, measurable, predictable progress. If
If pragmatists are hard to win over, they are loyal once won, often enforcing a company standard that requires the purchase of your product, and only your product, for a given requirement.
When pragmatists buy, they care about the company they are buying from, the quality of the product they are buying, the infrastructure of supporting products and system interfaces, and the reliability of the service they are going to get. In other words, they are planning on living with this decision personally for a long time to come.
it is very tough to break into a new industry selling to pragmatists.
develop an alliance with one of the already accepted vendors or if it can establish a value-added-reseller (VAR) sales base.
Market leadership is crucial, therefore, to winning pragmatist customers.
Conservatives, in particular, are extremely service oriented.
the primary function of high-tech marketing in relation to skeptics is to neutralize their influence.
One of the favorite arguments of skeptics is that disruptive innovations of any kind rarely fulfill their promises and almost always come with unintended consequences.
Therefore, to secure these much-needed references, which is our prime goal in crossing the chasm, we must commit ourselves to providing, or at least guaranteeing the provision of, the whole product. Whole product commitments,
the segment-targeting company can expect word-of-mouth leverage early in its crossing-the-chasm marketing effort,
be niche focused when crossing the chasm,
only right strategy is to take a “big fish, small pond” approach.
interesting . is ghe market segment lrg enough? assume dominance is 50%
the first key to getting out was to select a beachhead market segment,
when you are picking a chasm-crossing target it is not about the number of people involved, it is about the amount of pain they are causing. In
The first is knocking over the head pin, taking the beachhead, crossing the chasm (and chaining together three mixed metaphors to do it!). The size of the first pin is not the issue, but the economic value of the problem it fixes is. The more serious the problem, the faster the target niche will pull you out of the chasm. Once out, your opportunities to expand into other niches are immensely increased because now, having one set of pragmatist customers solidly behind you, you are much less risky for others to back as a new vendor.
To cross the chasm you need a use case that poses equally challenging problems for the status quo solutions on a recurring basis.
The fundamental principle for crossing the chasm is to target a specific niche market as your point of attack and focus all your resources on achieving the dominant leadership position in that segment as quickly as possible.
You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use.
We need to work with something that gives more clues about how to proceed in the presence of real people with complex motives. However,
Turning back to the checklist, the four factors that raise showstopper issues for crossing the chasm are as follows:
TARGET CUSTOMER: Is there a single, identifiable economic buyer for this offer, readily accessible to the sales channel we intend to use, and sufficiently well funded to pay the price for the whole product?
COMPELLING REASON TO BUY: Are the economic consequences sufficient to make any reasonable economic buyer anxious to fix the problem called out in the scenario?
COMPETITION: Has this problem already been addressed by another company such that they have crossed the chasm ahead of us and occupied the space we would be targeting?
to cross into the mainstream market—you have to first meet the demands of the pragmatist customers. These customers want the whole product to be readily available from the outset.
minimum commitment to whole product needed to cross the chasm. That is defined by the whole product that assures that the target customers can fulfill their compelling reason to buy.
But while you are crossing the chasm, there is no hope of any external support that is not specifically recruited by you for this purpose.
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.
people could buy in based on their own self-interest, not just in order to get a “good deal.”
In the pragmatist’s domain, competition is defined by comparative evaluations of products and vendors within a common category.
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.
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.
Positioning, first and foremost, is a noun, not a verb. That is, it is best understood as an attribute associated with a company or a product, and not as the marketing contortions that people go through to set up that association. 2. Positioning is the single largest influence on the buying decision. It serves as a kind of buyers’ shorthand, shaping not only their final choice but even the way they evaluate alternatives leading up to that choice. In other words, evaluations are often simply rationalizations of preestablished positioning. 3. Positioning exists in people’s heads, not in your
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demand the least amount of change.
make them easier to buy.
By focusing on making a product easy to buy, you are focusing on what the customers really want.
1. Name it and frame it. Potential customers cannot buy what they cannot name, nor can they seek out the product unless they know what category to look under. This is the minimum amount of positioning needed to make the product easy to buy for a technology enthusiast. The goal here is to create a technically
accurate description of the disruptive innovation that puts it into its ontologically correct category with a descriptive modifier that sets it apart from the other members of that category. Think Linnaeus cataloging the world of biological organisms.
Who for and what for. Customers will not buy something until they know who is going to use it and for what purpose. This is the minimum extension to positioning needed to make the product easy to buy for the visionary.
The key idea here is to focus on the So what? and the Who cares? part of the value proposition. If
Competition and differentiation. Customers cannot know what to expect or what to pay for a product until they can place it in some sort of comparative context.
