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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

To define the battle effectively so that you win the business of a pragmatist buyer, you must: 1. Focus the competition within the market segment established by your must-have value proposition—that is, that combination of target customer, product offering, and compelling reason to buy that establishes your primary reason for being. 2. Create the competition around what, for a pragmatist buyer, represents a reasonable and reasonably comprehensive set of alternative ways of achieving this value proposition. Do not tamper with this set by artificially excluding a reasonable competitor—nothing is more likely to alienate your pragmatist buyer. 3. Focus your communications by reducing your fundamental competitive claim to a two-sentence formula and then managing every piece of company communication to ensure that it always stays within the bounds set out by that formula. In particular, always be sure to reinforce the second sentence of this claim, the one that identifies your primary competition and how you are differentiated from it. 4. Demonstrate the validity of your competitive claim through the quality of your whole product solution and the quality of your partners and allies, so that the pragmatist buyer will conclude you are, or must shortly become, the indisputable leader of this competitive set.