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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

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.

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.

we are introduced to products that require us to change our current mode of behavior or to modify other products and services we rely on.

winning them over at the outset of a marketing campaign is important nonetheless, because their endorsement reassures the other players in the marketplace that the product could in fact work.

The early majority share some of the early adopter’s ability to relate to technology, but ultimately they are driven by a strong sense of practicality. They know that many of these newfangled inventions end up as passing fads, so they are content to wait and see how other people are making out before they buy in themselves. They want to see well-established references before investing substantially.

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.

First, and most crucially, they want the truth, and without any tricks.

Finally, they want everything cheap. This is sometimes a matter of budgets, but it is more fundamentally a problem of perception—they think all technology should be free or available at cost, and they have no use for “added-value” arguments.

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.

The core of the dream is a business goal, not a technology goal, and it involves taking a quantum leap forward in how business is conducted in their industry or by their customers. It also involves a high degree of personal recognition and reward. Understand their dream, and you will understand how to market to them.

when Harry McMahon at Merrill Lynch committed to put ten thousand people on Salesforce.com’s cloud-based sales force automation system at a time when that vendor had no other large enterprise customer, he was acting as a visionary.

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