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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

Not content to slink off the stage without some revenge, this sullen and resentful crew casts about among themselves to find a scapegoat, and whom do they light upon? With unfailing consistency and unerring accuracy, all fingers point to—the vice president of marketing. It is marketing’s fault! Salesforce outmarketed RightNow, LinkedIn outmarketed Plaxo, Akamai outmarketed Internap, Rackspace outmarketed Terremark. Now we too have been outmarketed. Firing is too good for this monster. Hang him!

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. The gap between these two markets, all too frequently ignored, is in fact so significant as to warrant being called a chasm, and crossing this chasm must be the primary focus of any long-term high-tech marketing plan.

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.

focus everyone on pursuing a high-probability course of action and making as few mistakes as possible.

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.

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.

First there is a mountain, Then there is no mountain, Then there is. —Zen proverb

What is it about California? How can any state be so successful and yet so weird?

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.

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.

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