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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

Now the question is: When are you going to buy one?

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.

the early adopters expect to get a jump on the competition, whether from lower product costs, faster time to market, more complete customer service, or some other comparable business advantage. They expect a radical discontinuity between the old ways and the new, and they are prepared to champion this cause against entrenched resistance. Being the first, they also are prepared to bear with the inevitable bugs and glitches that accompany any innovation just coming to market.

early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations. They are looking to minimize the discontinuity with the old ways. They want evolution, not revolution. They want technology to enhance, not overthrow, the established ways of doing business. And above all, they do not want to debug somebody else’s product. By the time they adopt it, they want it to work properly and to integrate appropriately with their existing technology base.

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.

What the company staff interpreted as a ramp in sales leading smoothly “up the curve” was in fact an initial blip—what we will be calling the early market—and not the first indications of an emerging mainstream market. The company failed because its managers were unable to recognize that there is something fundamentally different between a sale to an early adopter and a sale to the early majority,

the innovators are better known as technology enthusiasts or just techies, whereas the early adopters are the visionaries.

visionaries are also effective at alerting the business community to pertinent technology advances. Outgoing and ambitious as a group, they are usually more than willing to serve as highly visible references, thereby drawing the attention of the business press

In sum, visionaries represent an opportunity early in a product’s life cycle to generate a burst of revenue and gain exceptional visibility.

the technology enthusiasts get to buy more toys than they have ever dreamed of, the entrepreneurial company commits itself to product modifications and system integration services it never intended to, and the visionary has what on paper looks to be an achievable project, but which is in fact a highly improbable dream.

This last point is crucial: Pragmatists want to buy from proven market leaders because they know that third parties will design supporting products around a market-leading product.

they get measured year in and year out on what their operation has spent versus what it has returned to the corporation.

Overall, to market to pragmatists, you must be patient. You need to be conversant with the issues that dominate their particular business. You need to show up at the industry-specific conferences and trade shows they attend. You need to be mentioned in articles that run in the newsletters and blogs they read. You need to be installed in other companies in their industry. You need to have developed applications for your product that are specific to their industry. You need to have partnerships and alliances with the other vendors who serve their industry. You need to have earned a reputation for quality and service. In short, you need to make yourself over into the obvious supplier of choice.

Often their real goal in buying high-tech products is simply not to get stung.

The products they understand best are those dedicated to a single function—music, video, email, games. The notion that a single device could do all four of these functions does not excite them—instead, it is something they find vaguely nauseating.

Just as the visionaries drive the development of the early market, so do the pragmatists drive the development of the mainstream market. Winning their support is not only the point of entry but the key to long-term dominance. But having done so, you cannot take the market for granted.

Visionaries lack respect for the value of colleagues’ experiences. Visionaries are the first people in their industry segment to see the potential of the new technology. Fundamentally, they see themselves as smarter than their opposite numbers in competitive companies—and quite often they are. Indeed, it is their ability to see things first that they want to leverage into a competitive advantage. That advantage can only come about if no one else has discovered it.

Visionaries take a greater interest in technology than in their industry. Visionaries are defining the future. You meet them at technology conferences and other futurist forums where people gather to forecast trends and seek out new market opportunities. They are easy to strike up a conversation with, and they understand and appreciate what high-tech companies and high-tech products are trying to do. They want to talk ideas with bright people. They are bored with the mundane details of their own industries. They like to talk and think high tech.

Pragmatists, on the other hand, don’t put a lot of stake in futuristic things. They see themselves more in present-day terms, as the people devoted to making the wheels of their industry turn.

Visionaries have little self-awareness about the impact of their disruptiveness. From a pragmatist’s point of view, visionaries are the people who come in and soak up all the budget for their pet projects. If the project is a success, they take all the credit, while the pragmatists get stuck trying to maintain a system that is so “state-of-the-art” no one is quite sure how to keep it working.

Visionaries, successful or not, don’t plan to stick around long.

Pragmatists, on the other hand, tend to be committed long term to their profession and the company at which they work. They are very cautious about grandiose schemes because they know they will have to live with the results.

pragmatists are not anxious to reference visionaries in their buying decisions. Hence the chasm.

Or the company may be saying “state-of-the-art” when the pragmatist wants to hear “industry standard.”

No one wants your presence. You are an invader. This is not a time to focus on being nice. As we have already said, the perils of the chasm make this a life-or-death situation for you.

Our long-term goal is to enter and take control of a mainstream market (Western Europe) that is currently dominated by an entrenched competitor (the Axis). For our product to wrest the mainstream market from this competitor, we must assemble an invasion force comprising other products and companies (the Allies). By way of entry into this market, our immediate goal is to transition from an early market base (England) to a strategic target market segment in the mainstream (the beaches at Normandy). Separating us from our goal is the chasm (the English Channel). We are going to cross that chasm as fast as we can with an invasion force focused directly and exclusively on the point of attack (D-Day). Once we force the competitor out of our targeted niche markets (secure the beachhead), then we will move out to take over adjacent market segments (districts of France) on the way toward overall market domination (the liberation of Western Europe). That’s it. That’s the strategy.

if we don’t take Normandy, we don’t have to worry about how we’re going to take Paris.

One of the keys in breaking into a new market is to establish a strong word-of-mouth reputation among buyers.

Now, for word of mouth to develop in any particular marketplace, there must be a critical mass of informed individuals who meet from time to time and, in exchanging views, reinforce the product’s or the company’s positioning. That’s how word of mouth spreads.

Your customers may try to start a conversation about you, but there will be no one there to reinforce it. By contrast, winning four or five customers in one segment will create the desired effect.

One of the main reasons they delay their buying decisions at the beginning of a marketplace—thereby creating the chasm effect—is to help them get a fix on who the leader will be. They don’t want to back the wrong one.

pragmatists tend to buy from market leaders,

The key to moving beyond one’s initial target niche is to select strategic target market segments to begin with. That is, target a segment that, by virtue of its other connections, creates an entry point into one or more adjacent segments.

The more serious the problem, the faster the target niche will pull you out of the chasm.

A key lesson to learn here is that you want to target a beachhead segment that is: • Big enough to matter • Small enough to win, and a • Good fit with your crown jewels.

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

If pragmatists can live with the problem for another year, they will.

The good news in this is that you do not have to pick the optimal beachhead to be successful. What you must do is win the beachhead you have picked.

The enemy in the chasm is always time.

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

The goal is to become a big fish in a small pond,

marketing is warfare—not wordfare.

For a given target customer and a given application, create a marketplace in which your product is the only reasonable buying proposition.

Real techies don’t need whole products.

In short, winning the whole product battle means winning the war. And because perception contributes to that reality, looking like you are winning the whole product battle is a key weapon to winning the war. On the other hand, pretending you are winning the whole product battle is a losing tactic—people check up on each other too much in the high-tech marketplace.

the company cultures are normally too antithetical to cooperate with each other.

any company that executes a whole product strategy competently has a high probability of mainstream market success.

In sum, the pragmatists are loath to buy until they can compare. Competition, therefore, becomes a fundamental condition for purchase.

In the early market, where decisions are dominated by technology enthusiasts and visionaries, the key value domains are technology and product. In the mainstream, where decisions are dominated by pragmatists and conservatives, the key domains are market and company.

The key takeaway from this section is that positioning is more about the audience’s state of mind than yours.