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.

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.

The key point is that, in contrast with the technology enthusiast, a visionary focuses on value not from a system’s technology per se but rather from the strategic leap forward such technology can enable.

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.

Trying to cross the chasm without taking a niche market approach is like trying to light a fire without kindling.

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

That was because new drug applications range from 250,000 to 500,000 pages in length, and come from a myriad of sources—clinical trial studies, correspondence, manufacturing databases, the Patent Office, research lab notebooks, and the like. All this material has to be frozen in time as a master copy, against which all subsequent changes in information are posted and tracked. It is a nightmare of a problem, and it was costing the drug companies big bucks—basically one million dollars per day!

Talk about red tape. The FDA is going to read 500k pages for each page. Right.

Competition, therefore, becomes a fundamental condition for purchase. So, coming from the early market, where there are typically no perceived competing products, with the goal of penetrating the mainstream, you often have to go out and create your competition.

In sum, to the pragmatist buyer, the most powerful evidence of leadership and likelihood of competitive victory is market share. In the absence of definitive numbers here, pragmatists will look to the quality and number of partners and allies you have assembled in your camp, and their degree of demonstrable commitment to your cause.

The number-one corporate objective, when crossing the chasm, is to secure a distribution channel into the mainstream market, one with which the pragmatist customer will be comfortable.

All too frequently, even when they are led by experienced managers, enterprises that are venture funded for long periods of time fall into a “welfare state mentality,” losing their sense of urgency, and looking for their next paycheck to come from yet another round of financing instead of from the marketplace.

product manager is normally a member of the development organization who is responsible for ensuring that a product gets created, tested, and shipped on budget, on schedule, and according to specification. It is a highly internally focused job, bridging the marketing and development organizations, and requiring a high degree of technical competence and project management experience.

A product marketing manager is always a member of the marketing organization, never of the development group, and is responsible for bringing the product to the marketplace and making it accessible to the distribution channel. This includes all the elements on the crossing-the-chasm agenda, from target customer identification through to pricing. It is a highly externally focused job.

To sum up, at the beginning of the chasm period, the organization is dominated by pioneers, with strong powers invested in a few top-gun salespeople and product managers. By the time we are into the mainstream market, that power should be distributed far more broadly among major account managers, industry marketing managers, and product marketing managers. This gradual dissemination of authority will ultimately frustrate the pioneer contributors, hampering their ability to make quick decisions and rapid responses. Ultimately, it will make them want to leave.

Product life cycles truly are getting shorter—but whole product life cycles are as long as they ever were. Ask Adobe about Photoshop or Apple about the Mac.