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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

A consumer’s degree of enlistment manifests itself in three states. At its highest level, it’s the kind of evangelical behavior we are talking about here. This is the key to viral marketing, where your cost of customer acquisition plummets because your existing customers act as your best marketing campaign. Think of this as the equivalent to an NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 9 or 10 (“I would definitely recommend this to a friend”). A lesser state of enlistment, one more akin to an NPS of 7 or 8 (“I would probably recommend this to a friend”), does not fuel viral marketing, but it does ensure consumer retention. This is equivalent to an entrenched brand preference—when I buy beer it is Heineken or Beck’s Non-Alcoholic. I don’t evangelize either brand, but they always get my business. This is the level of enlistment needed to forestall churn. When enlistment falls below this level, one now more akin to an NPS score of 1 through 6 (“I would have reservations about recommending this to a friend”), that can signal anything from openness to switching to outright defection. Indeed, at the bottom of the range, it likely indicates counterevangelism, which is about as bad as it gets in consumer marketing, as in the 2004 film about McDonald’s, Super Size Me.