Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Project
4.5/5
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About this ebook
Here is the bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.
Editor's Note
Most impactful business book…
Moore guides readers through the technology adoption lifecycle and provides an overview of the chasm that exists between early adopters and mainstream consumers, where many great products “languish and companies die.” Outlines common errors and provides tangible steps to avoid them.
Geoffrey A. Moore
Geoffrey A. Moore is the author of Escape Velocity, Inside the Tornado, and Living on the Fault Line.
Read more from Geoffrey A. Moore
Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future from the Pull of the Past Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gorilla Game, Revised Edition: Picking Winners in High Technology Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLiving on the Fault Line, Revised Edition: Managing for Shareholder Value in Any Economy Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
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Reviews for Crossing the Chasm
90 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A must read for startup entrepreneurs
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If your background is in engineering or mathematics, you probably have enough prejudice against marketing books full of hype and buzz. Especially if you've been in the field and observed many a brand come and go throughout the last 20 years, you will really have a hard time reading marketing books with big words, let alone recommend them to your peers. Fortunately, Crossing the Chasm is a rare book, or should I say an outlier in this respect, that goes to the heart of the matter, and in a few pages shows what the real challenges are for a new high-tech company when it comes to marketing and establishing a brand.There are a lot of important lessons to learn from this book and I think even the simplest lesson, that there is a big chasm to be crossed, where exactly it is placed, why it exists, and you better be aware of it for your own good, is enough reason to read this book. But of course the book does not stop there, and continue with important topics such as what companies should do in each phase of their life-cycle, what types of users / customers are there, what kind of strategies you need to employ for which type of user and when you should do that, what the whole product means versus the core technology itself and a few other important points. Another lesson that is crystal clear: The enthusiasm and the bright energy of the starting point, all of those technological innovations are great and cool, without them you cannot start any high-tech product but it is also sad to see that they are not enough for being really successful and establishing the product as the dominant brand in the sector.The no-nonsense approach of the author, as well as the striking and famous examples he uses to convey his messages are very well thought out. The book never gets dull and I have earmarked many pages, underlined many sentences and could not help myself for applying the principles to other technology example I have witnessed practically during the last 20 years. What I really liked in the end is that it gives me a time-tested solid framework for thinking and analyzing many cases and focus on what not to do, as well as things to be done.It is a pleasure to see that so many years after its publication, the basic principles and lessons of the book are still very much relevant. I will not hesitate to recommend this book to my peers and keep it hidden from my competitors.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Crossing the Chasm focuses on how companies - especially technology providers - can make the leap from their early market to mainstream adoption. It's critical to understand how the customer needs and perspectives differ between the various stages of early and later adoption. In between is a fundamental shift in needs and expectations. Crossing that chasm requires building momentum the right way. I found this book practical for analogous situations, including that of the internal specialized provider.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The first half of this book is gold. It kicks off with the diffusion of innovations theory and a characterization of innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. It goes through lots of concrete strategy on how to market to each of these groups, how different they are, and why there is a tricky chasm between the two early adopter groups and everyone else. The lessons here go beyond marketing a product and are just as useful in other contexts, such as how to convince people at your own company to do something. The writing is clear, keeps jargon to a minimum, and has lots of good analogies and even a few good jokes.
As you get into the second half of the book, it runs out of steam. Or, to be fair, perhaps it just wasn't what I was looking for. It starts to go into detailed tactics, and at this level of detail, the book really shows its age. Many of the companies and technologies it uses as examples are long gone. Worse yet, some of the advice doesn't make sense any more. For example, the book describes the Internet as an up and coming technology you might want to pay attention to. The book also shies away from any sort of data or talking to real customers in favor of intuition and experience. This may be the right decision in some scenarios, but with the data access and analysis we have today, it's not always a good trade-off.
In short, well worth reading the first few parts to wrap your head around the different customer segments and how your marketing tactics have to change as you capture more of the market, but consider skipping the rest.
Some good quotes from the book:
Innovators pursue new technology products aggressively. They sometimes seek them out even before a formal marketing program has been launched. This is because technology is a central interest in their life, regardless of what function it is performing.
Early adopters, like innovators, buy into new product concepts very early in their life cycle, but unlike innovators, they are not technologists. Rather they are people who find it easy to imagine, understand, and appreciate the benefits of a new technology, and to relate these potential benefits to their other concerns.
[...]
The early majority share some of the early adopter’s ability to relate to technology, but ultimately they are driven by a strong sense of practicality. They know that many of these newfangled inventions end up as passing fads, so they are content to wait and see how other people are making out before they buy in themselves.
[...]
The late majority shares all the concerns of the early majority, plus one major additional one: Whereas people in the early majority are comfortable with their ability to handle a technology product, should they finally decide to purchase it, members of the late majority are not. As a result, they wait until something has become an established standard, and even then they want to see lots of support and tend to buy, therefore, from large, well-established companies.
[...]
Finally there are the laggards. These people simply don’t want anything to do with new technology, for any of a variety of reasons, some personal and some economic. The only time they ever buy a technological product is when it is buried so deep inside another product—the way, say, that a microprocessor is designed into the braking system of a new car—that they don’t even know it is there.
What the early adopter is buying [...] 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. 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.
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. 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.
Marketing professionals insist on market segmentation because they know no meaningful marketing program can be implemented across a set of customers who do not reference each other. The reason for this is simply leverage. No company can afford to pay for every marketing contact made. Every program must rely on some ongoing chain-reaction effects—what is usually called word of mouth. The more self-referencing the market and the more tightly bounded its communications channels, the greater the opportunity for such effects.
When pragmatists buy, they care about the company they are buying from, the quality of the product they are buying, the infrastructure of supporting products and system interfaces, and the reliability of the service they are going to get. In other words, they are planning on living with this decision personally for a long time to come. (By contrast, the visionaries are more likely to be planning on implementing the great new order and then using that as a springboard to their next great career step upward.) Because pragmatists are in it for the long haul, and because they control the bulk of the dollars in the marketplace, the rewards for building relationships of trust with them are very much worth the effort.
Most companies fail to cross the chasm because, confronted with the immensity of opportunity represented by a mainstream market, they lose their focus, chasing every opportunity that presents itself, but finding themselves unable to deliver a salable proposition to any true pragmatist buyer. The D-Day strategy keeps everyone on point—if we don’t take Normandy, we don’t have to worry about how we’re going to take Paris.
Positioning is the single largest influence on the buying decision. It serves as a kind of buyers’ shorthand, shaping not only their final choice but even the way they evaluate alternatives leading up to that choice. In other words, evaluations are often simply rationalizations of pre-established positioning.
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. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The old "it" book of the technology business which brough the term "early adopters" into day to day corpo speak. Like most businees books, this is a very quick read and presents some a reasonable idea - how to move your customers from the type of people that must have any news thing - to the general public. Like most business books, yet again, it could have been a magazine article not a book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5OK I hate to say that such a banal business book captures in a few pages my over arching outlook on how change happens in the world (and just so happens to be a good way to approach launching high tech innovations). I refer to it often as a baseline for clients and anyone I am talking to to understand the process they are about to embark upon. I recommend it highly to all my clients so we can agree to speak the same language about product development and the world we are trying to launch it into.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Good if you want to understand the introduction of new technologies into the marketplace.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Good principles but dated examples make this a good but not perfect book. Very easy to skim and not feel like you are missing much.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Testing