Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

by Geoffrey A. Moore

Make a total commitment to the niche, and then do your best to meet everyone else’s needs with whatever resources you have left over.

Winning the beachhead, knocking over the head pin, creates a dynamic of follow-on adoption, opening up new market opportunities, in part from leveraging a solution from one niche to another, in part from word-of-mouth interaction between customers in the adjacent niches.

The commitment did not come from the IT organization, which pragmatically was content to work with its established vendors, making continuous improvements to the existing document management infrastructure. Instead, it came from the top brass who, seeing in Documentum a chance to reengineer the entire process to a very different new end, overruled the in-house folks and demanded that they support the new paradigm.

The more serious the problem, the faster the target niche will pull you out of the chasm. Once out, your opportunities to expand into other niches are immensely increased because now, having one set of customers solidly behind you, you are much less risky to back as a new vendor.

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By contrast, the companies who failed had overdesigned for the target market because they were hedging their bets. Ironically, in the act of trying to reduce their market risk, they actually increased it. Companies who cannot commit to a single chasm-crossing target almost always fall prey to this mistake.

Here is a proven formula for getting all this down into two short sentences. Try it out on your own company and one of its key products. Just fill in the blanks: For (target customers—beachhead segment only) Who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternative) Our product is a (new product category) That provides (key problem-solving capability). Unlike (the product alternative), We have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application). Let’s try this out with a few examples, starting with some we have already looked at earlier in the chapter. Silicon Graphics in Hollywood For post-production film engineers Who are dissatisfied with the limitations of traditional film editors Our workstation is a digital film editor That lets you modify film images any way you choose. Unlike workstations from Sun, HP, or IBM, We have assembled all the interfaces needed for post-production film editing. Intuit For the bill-paying member of the family who also uses a home PC Who is tired of filling out the same old checks month after month Quicken is a PC home finance program That automatically creates and tracks all your check-writing. Unlike Managing Your Money, a financial analysis package, Our system is optimized specifically for home bill-paying.