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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

The key issue now—transitioning from the early to the late majority—has to do with lingering residual demands on the end user to be technologically competent.

When a product reaches this point in the market development, it must be made increasingly easier to adopt in order to continue being successful. If this does not occur, the transition to the late majority will stall.

What the early adopter is buying, as we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 2, is some kind of change agent. By

By contrast, the early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations.

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.

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.

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.

Every program must rely on some ongoing chain-reaction effects—what is usually called word of mouth.

Direct response advertising works well with this group, as they are the segment most likely to send for literature, or a free demo, a webinar, or whatever else of substance you offer. Just don’t waste your money on a lot of fancy image advertising—they read all that as marketing hype. Direct email will reach them—and provided it is factual and new information, they read cover to cover.

One final characteristic of pragmatist buyers is that they like to see competition—in part to get costs down, in part to have the security of more than one alternative to fall back on should anything go wrong, and in part to assure themselves they are buying from a proven market leader.

Market leadership is crucial, therefore, to winning pragmatist customers.

Pragmatists are reasonably price-sensitive. They are willing to pay a modest premium for top quality or special services, but in the absence of any special differentiation, they want the best deal.

Companies just starting out, as well as any marketing program operating with scarce resources, must operate in a tightly bound market to be competitive.

The sole goal of the company during this stage of market development must be to secure a beachhead in a mainstream market—that is, to create a pragmatist customer base that is referenceable,

when you are picking a chasm-crossing target it is not about the number of people involved, it is about the amount of pain they are causing.

The second key is to have lined up other market segments into which you can leverage your initial niche solution.

In sum, 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.

In other words, we must shift our marketing focus from celebrating product-centric value attributes to market-centric ones.

Here there is one fundamental key to success: When most people think of positioning in this way, they are thinking about how to make their products easier to sell. But the correct goal is to make them easier to buy.

Remember, the goal of positioning is to create and occupy a space inside the target customers’ head.

And when compensation programs do discriminate—when they discourage the very behaviors that ought to be rewarded, or vice versa—then organizations fail.