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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

To be specific, the point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation.

Every truly innovative high-tech product starts out as a fad—something with no known market value or purpose but with “great properties” that generate a lot of enthusiasm within an “in crowd” of early adopters. That’s the early market.

One of the most important lessons about crossing the chasm is that the task ultimately requires achieving an unusual degree of company unity during the crossing period. This is a time when one should forgo the quest for eccentric marketing genius in favor of achieving an informed consensus among mere mortals. It is a time not for dashing and expensive gestures but rather for careful plans and cautiously rationed resources—a time not to gamble all on some brilliant coup but rather to focus everyone on pursuing a high-probability course of action and making as few mistakes as possible.

In all these cases, the innovation demands significant changes by not only the consumer but also the infrastructure of supporting businesses that provide complementary products and services to round out the complete

Sooner or later, all businesses must make these demands. And so it is that all businesses can profit by lessons from high-tech industries.

In this effort, companies must use each “captured” group as a reference base for launching their marketing into the next group.

As you can see, the components of the life cycle are unchanged, but between any two psychographic groups has been introduced a gap. This symbolizes the dissociation between the two groups—that is, the difficulty any group will have in accepting a new product if it is presented in the same way as it was to the group to its immediate left.

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.

No, the real news is the deep and dividing chasm that separates the early adopters from the early majority. This is by far the most formidable and unforgiving transition in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, and it is all the more dangerous because it typically goes unrecognized.

What the early adopter is buying, as we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 2, is some kind of change agent.

By contrast, the early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations.

Because of these incompatibilities, early adopters do not make good references for the early majority. And because of the early majority’s concern not to disrupt their organizations, good references are critical to their buying decisions. So what we have here is a catch-22. The only suitable reference for an early majority customer, it turns out, is another member of the early majority, but no upstanding member of the early majority will buy without first having consulted with several suitable references.

Actually, in this context, defining marketing is not particularly difficult: It simply means taking actions to create, grow, maintain, or defend markets.

If two people buy the same product for the same reason but have no way they could reference each other, they are not part of the same market.

Marketing professionals insist on market segmentation because they know that no meaningful marketing program can be implemented across a set of customers who do not reference each other.

Classically, the first people to adopt any new technology are those who appreciate the technology for its own sake.

Visionaries are that rare breed of people who have the insight to match up an emerging technology to a strategic opportunity, the temperament to translate that insight into a high-visibility, high-risk project, and the charisma to get the rest of their organization to buy into that project.

Visionaries are not looking for an improvement; they are looking for a fundamental breakthrough.

The visionaries’ idea is to be able to stay very close to the development train to make sure it is going in the right direction and to be able to get off if they discover it is not going where they thought.

The winning strategy is built around the entrepreneur being able to “productize” the deliverables from each phase of the visionary project.

Here again, account management and executive restraint are crucial. The goal should be to package each of the phases such that each phase: 1. is accomplishable by mere mortals working in earth time 2. provides the vendor with a marketable product 3. provides the customer with a concrete return on investment that can be celebrated as a major step forward.

The way they find you, interestingly enough, is by maintaining relationships with technology enthusiasts. That is one of the reasons why it is so important to capture the technology enthusiast segment.

To get an early market started requires an entrepreneurial company with a breakthrough technology product that enables a new and compelling application, a technology enthusiast who can evaluate and appreciate the superiority of the product over current alternatives, and a well-heeled visionary who can foresee an order-of-magnitude

The basis for reform is the principle that winning at marketing more often than not means being the biggest fish in the pond.

The Fortune 2000 IT community, as a group, is led by people who are largely pragmatist in orientation.

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. (By

Overall, to market to pragmatists, you must be patient. You need to be conversant with the issues that dominate their particular business. You need to show up at the industry-specific conferences and trade shows they attend. You need to be mentioned in articles that run in the newsletters and blogs they read. You need to be installed in other companies in their industry. You need to have developed applications for your product that are specific to their industry. You need to have partnerships and alliances with the other vendors who serve their industry. You need to have earned a reputation for quality and service. In short, you need to make yourself over into the obvious supplier of choice.

Conservatives, in essence, are against discontinuous innovations. They believe far more in tradition than in progress.

The quality of the package should be quite high because there is nothing in it that has not already been thoroughly debugged. The price should be quite low because all the R&D has long since been amortized, and every bit of the manufacturing learning curve has been taken advantage of. It is, in short, not just a pure marketing ploy but a true solution

Just as the visionaries drive the development of the early market, so do the pragmatists drive the development of the mainstream market.

To maintain leadership in a mainstream market, you must at least keep pace with the competition.

The key lesson is that the longer your product is in the market, the more mature it becomes, and the more important the service element is to the customer. Conservatives, in particular, are extremely service oriented.

Ultimately the service that skeptics provide to high-tech marketers is to point continually to the discrepancies between the sales claims and the delivered product.

The key to the Normandy advantage, what allows the fledgling enterprise to win over pragmatist customers in advance of broader market acceptance, is focusing an overabundance of support into a confined market niche.

To put it simply, the consequences of being sales-driven during the chasm period are fatal. Here’s why: The sole goal of the company during this stage of market development must be to secure a beachhead in a mainstream market—that is, to create a pragmatist customer base that is referenceable, people who can, in turn, gain us access to other mainstream prospects. To capture this reference base, we must ensure that our first set of customers completely satisfy their buying objectives. To do that, we must ensure that the customer gets not just the product but what we will describe in a later chapter as the whole product—the complete set of products and services needed to achieve their desired result, the thing we promised them to get the purchase order.

Now, for word of mouth to develop in any particular marketplace, there must be a critical mass of informed individuals who meet from time to time and, in exchanging views, reinforce the product’s or the company’s positioning. That’s how word of mouth spreads.

Pragmatist customers want to buy from market leaders. Their motive is simple: Whole products grow up around the market-leading products and not around the others.

Well, software programs at the application layer are “naturally vertical” because they directly interface with end users, and end users organize themselves by geography, industry, and profession.

The answer is that 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 case of the pharmaceutical industry’s regulatory affairs function, the pain was excruciating.

This is a standard pattern in crossing the chasm. It is normally the departmental function who leads (they have the problem), the executive function who prioritizes (the problem is causing enterprise-wide grief), and the technical function that follows (they have to make the new stuff work while still maintaining all the old stuff).

it was not the right target segment for crossing the chasm because its needs, while more pervasive, were not as urgent as those of the pharmaceutical industry.

“If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.”

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.

The place where most crossing-the-chasm marketing segmentation efforts get into trouble is at the beginning, when they focus on a target market or target segment instead of on a target customer.

Expect that the best scenarios will be “whole product challenged”—if it were easy, someone else would have done it. Indeed, the fact that it is hard will create a barrier to entry in your favor once you have stepped up to the solution.

These customers want the whole product to be readily available from the outset. They like a product such as Microsoft Office because virtually every desktop and laptop supports it, files are exchangeable without fuss, there are books in every bookstore about how to use it, not to mention seminars for training, hotline support, and a whole cadre of temporary office workers already trained on its core products of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The single most important difference between early markets and mainstream markets is that the former are willing to take responsibility for piecing together the whole product (in return for getting a jump on their competition), whereas the latter are not.

In short, winning the whole product battle means winning the war. And because perception contributes to that reality, looking like you are winning the whole product battle is a key weapon to winning the war. On the other hand, pretending you are winning the whole product battle is a losing tactic—people check up on each other too much in the high-tech marketplace.

As even this cursory listing indicates, every additional new target customer will put additional new demands on the whole product.