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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

Innovators pursue new technology products aggressively. They sometimes seek them out even before a formal marketing program has been launched. This is because technology is a central interest in their life, regardless of what function it is performing. At root they are intrigued with any fundamental advance and often make a technology purchase simply for the pleasure of exploring the new device’s properties.

Early adopters, like innovators, buy into new product concepts very early in their life cycle, but unlike innovators, they are not technologists. Rather they are people who find it easy to imagine, understand, and appreciate the benefits of a new technology, and to relate these potential benefits to their other concerns.

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.

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.

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.

To put it simply, the consequences of being sales-driven during the chasm period are fatal.

Why is this important? 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. This makes them readily adaptable to the beachhead focus needed to cross the chasm. Later on in the life cycle, however, as solutions generalize, a horizontal approach is typically more productive, but this is a much harder challenge for an application offer to meet. By contrast, infrastructure offerings have just the opposite dynamic. They are “naturally horizontal,” because they interface with machines and other programs where the value, in part, is providing a stable, standard interface. They do not lend themselves to vertical marketing because, as products, they do not change very much from niche to niche.

The critical attitude to maintain in all four of these challenges is that chasm crossing represents a unique time in your enterprise’s history. It is a far cry both from your past, where selling to visionaries was the key to success, and your future, which will be focused on either niche or mass-market expansion programs. Between these two stages is a singular moment of transition, the penetration of the mainstream market, an act of burglary, of breaking and entering, that requires special techniques used at no other time in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle.

You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use.

Big enough to matter, small enough to lead, good fit with your crown jewels.