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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

one of the key things a pragmatist customer insists on seeing is viable competition. If you are fresh from developing a new value proposition with visionaries, that competition is not likely to exist—at least not in a form that a pragmatist would appreciate. What you have to do then is create it.

the pragmatists are loath to buy until they can compare. 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.

The key is to focus in on the values and concerns of the pragmatists, not the visionaries. It helps to start with the right conceptual model—in this case, the Competitive Positioning Compass. That model is designed to create a value profile of target customers anywhere in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, identify what to them would appear to be the most reasonable competitive set, develop comparative rankings within that set on the value attributes with the highest ranking in their profile, and then build our positioning strategy development around those comparative rankings.

For (target customers—beachhead segment only) • Who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternative) • Our product is a (product category) • That provides (compelling reason to buy). • Unlike (the product alternative), • We have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application).

The post-chasm enterprise is bound by the commitments made by the pre-chasm enterprise. These pre-chasm commitments, made in haste during the flurry of just trying to get a foothold in an early market, are all too frequently simply unmaintainable in the new situation. That is, they promise a level of performance or reward that, if delivered, would simply destroy the enterprise.

To leave the chasm behind, to cross it and not fall back into it, involves a transformation in the enterprise that few individuals can span. It is the move from being pioneers to becoming settlers.

By way of parting, let us look back over the ground we have covered over the course of this book. We began by isolating a fundamental flaw in the prevailing High-Tech Marketing Model—the notion that rapid mainstream market growth could follow continuously on the heels of early market success. By analyzing the characteristics of visionaries and pragmatists, we were able to see that a far more normal development would be a chasm period of little to no growth. This period was identified as perilous indeed, giving companies every incentive to pass through it as rapidly as possible. Taking such rapid passage as our charter, we then embarked on setting forth a strategy and set of tactics for accomplishing it. The fundamental strategic principle was to launch a D-Day type of invasion, one focused on a highly specific target segment within a mainstream marketplace. The tactics for implementing that invasion were then set out in four clusters. To begin with, we had to target the point of attack, which meant isolating our target customers and their compelling reason to buy. Then we had to assemble the invasion force, constructed around the whole product and the partners and allies needed to make it a reality. The next step was to define the battle, by creating our competition and positioning ourselves, in that context, as being easy to buy. Finally, we had to launch the invasion, selecting our intended distribution channel and setting our pricing to give us motivational leverage ove...