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

by Geoffrey A. Moore

It turns out that Crossing the Chasm is at heart a B2B market development model. It can be applied to B2C, at times quite effectively, but at the end of the day, it is not normally the best model to use. Instead, a model we have been calling the Four Gears has proved more useful for digital entrepreneurs building consumer businesses. So that is the topic addressed in the second appendix.

The idea is to keep this process moving smoothly, progressing something like the passing of a baton in a relay race or like Tarzan making his way across the jungle swinging from vine to well-placed vine. It is important to maintain momentum in order to create a bandwagon effect that makes it natural for the next group to want to buy in. Too much of a delay and the effect would be something like hanging from a motionless vine—nowhere to go but down.

From this notion comes the idea of a window of opportunity. If momentum is lost, then we can be overtaken by a competitor, thereby losing the advantages exclusive to a technology leadership position—specifically, the profit-margin advantage during the middle to late stages, which is the primary source from which high-tech fortunes are made.

The Apple iPad is a prime example of leveraging the High-Tech Marketing Model end to end. Launched in 2009 after being demoed at MacWorld by Steve Jobs, its touch-interface dynamics and gorgeous display of images made it an instant hit with Mac enthusiasts, selling three hundred thousand units its first day. Then visionary executives began using it as their personal digital assistant, especially for email and presentations, forcing their CIOs to find a way to accommodate them. Then sales executives, the ultimate pragmatists, found that iPads were great for one-on-one presentations to economic buyers, and now whole sales forces were getting outfitted.

Getting sponsors that has the power to influence the early majority.

What the early adopter is buying, as we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 2, is some kind of change agent. By being the first to implement this change in their industry, 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.

By contrast, the early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations. They are looking to minimize the discontinuity with the old ways.

In large part this is because of the high degree of discontinuity implicit in their adoption by organizations, and the inability of the marketing effort, to date, to lower this barrier to the early majority.

who have the insight to match up an emerging technology to a strategic opportunity, the temperament to translate that insight into a high-visibility, high-risk project, and the charisma to get the rest of their organization to buy into that project.

As a buying group, visionaries are easy to sell but very hard to please.

First, visionaries like a project orientation.