Customer Reviews

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

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Let's face it -- 80% of business books are pure garbage.

This is one of the gems. One that should sit on your office bookshelf.

Moore came up with an interesting take on how high tech businesses must move from early adopters to the mainstream and the challenges involved.

Long established as a classic, the drawing depicting the different classes of customers and their adoption rates are commonly used in the industry. I personally thought I already understood it, just from osmosis. However, reading the book taught me more about the characteristics of those customers, how you gain penetration into their markets, and most importantly how you manage a team and produce a product into those markets.

There are also lessons in there about establishing a beachhead and how to choose your target customer that dovetail nicely into some more modern work around persona identification in software development and the need to identify just one target persona for your application at a time. This is a great marketing book -- even if some of the specific company examples are somewhat dated -- whose concepts readily translate into not only management but directly into product development and vision.

There are some rare books that create revelations, and in my professional career, this is one of them. Now it is obvious why I often failed to connect with "Pragmatists" and other customers, who didn't seem to get it like the other "Visionaries" and "Technofiles" I had little trouble selling to.

I was the one who didn't get it!

In addition, marketing and sales books can be such dull tomes, but Moore's professional experience and accesible manner makes for an interesting read. His "lingo" has been picked up but many professionals, to the point where you need to read Moore just to be up to date. But the good news is, you will be much more effective in technical sales and marketing after reading this book.

There are plenty of long reviews on this, so here's just a short synthesis. This is considered the Bible of marketing thought for early stage, technically-oriented products. It describes the phases of customer thinking, and how you have to appeal to them, including some non-intuitive but dead-on approaches for making the leap to the Early Majority.

For some reason, this second edition seems to have been edited poorly though, with grammar erros and such. Unfortunate for a great work.

A good book. I don't know much about high-tech or marketing in general but it kept me turning the pages, non the less. However, for an ex-english prof., this piece is littered with typos! Moore's predictable humour lends itself nicely to the overall warming, I want to help you help yourself ambiance of the book. All now unemployed techies (and post-bubble, will-work-for-food VC's) will enjoy it as they cozy up in front of the fireplace and patch their wounds with the 'If only...' band-aid. Hindsight is always 20-20... I hope I can look into the future with such good vision. Anyway, this book will surely help.

"If you build a better mousetrap" is the old saw about inventing new and improved products. But this adage is completely wrong; if you build a better mousetrap, they DON'T come and buy it and you are left wondering why your product failed to make the grade.

Geoffrey Moore writes clearly about the need to cross the chasm that exists between those customers who buy the latest and greatest and those who hang back for a bit, waiting for..what? They are waiting for an incentive to buy your product for other reasons than "it's NEW!" The problem is, there aren't enough of the customers who will buy anything because it's new and exciting--and what's more, the these customers aren't particularly loyal. The sweet spot of customers are those who wait to see if something new and inventive actually gives them back something of worth, a return on investment, a better way to work, doing more with less, you name it. These customers will often switch to a new technology, but only if they have the right incentive to do so.

If you fail to market effectively to this type of customer, you end up with a pile of boutique products that languish in sales and don't ramp up the profits for your firm. To avoid this all-too-common scenario, many companies are now hiring consultants to teach Moore's methods to their marketing and R&D departments. By "Crossing the Chasm" they strive to market products that will sell. If you are in a tech business, and especially if you are an inventor marketing a new idea, reading this book is a very good idea. In fact, I'd say it's required reading.

'Crossing the Chasm' and 'Inside the Tornado' explain high-tech marketing strategies and product/technology life cycle. In the 90s, some of the most successful high-tech companies could be distinguished by their marketing strategies. Standard approach to marketing might be fine for other industries, but it has less chance of succeeding in high-tech industry. 'Crossing the Chasm' refers to product's acceptance by mass market. Typical product adaptation cycle would go through various phases that include: innovators (very narrow market), early adopters, (much larger than innovators, but still nothing major), early majority (this is where you want your product to get), late majority (still huge market), and laggards. Now, in high-tech world, there is a chasm between early adopters and early majority. It takes different approach to cross that chasm and get accepted by early majority.
Once you are on the other side of the chasm, be prepare for the 'tornado' phase. Your product/technology will take off with enormous power driven by huge market. You don't want to be at the point where market demand surpasses your supply. At this point your company can grow at hyper growth rate and gigantic revenues can be generated. We have seen this before so many times and some of the examples (Dell, MS, Oracle, Apple, etc...) are known to everybody.

This book tackles the Internet and the marketing tools needed to master this medium. I liked this, but it was not an easy read. I just picked up Guerrilla PR Wired, by Micheal Levine, and it is much more straight-forward and I am better able to understand the concepts within "Crossing the Chasm" because of it.

Both the Chasm and the Tornado books deal with the fundementals of how technology companies either do or should come to market. As so often with work like this it is often bought and a few pages read - and little is taken on board as to how to implement the ideas.

In my previous role in BT both these books were heavily promoted by PA Consultants who did a load of marketing training for us - but you tell me if you think they were read with any real insight?

The recommendations and points discussed relate to coming to the market through the early adopters and visionaries - then if successful we should be able to move to the mass market. Unfortunately even though we know this to be true intuitively and can prove it's true in the real world - most marketing departments want to go big, mass market, fast.

This is a bible for visionaries, innovators, start-ups, small businesses with a focus on customer relationships - if your in a big corporate, forget it. Nobody will let you proceed like this - it will be too contra to the arrogant,internal focus most corporates have.

If you consider yourself a visionary, manic business missionary - then this is the book for you (just don't expect your friends in big companies to understand what your talking about as they burn their way though millions of unfocused marketing budget!)

Crossing the Chasm (1991) and Inside the Tornado (1995) should be read in combination. Having just re-read both, I consider them even more valuable now than when they were first published. Chasm "is unabashedly about and for marketing within high-tech enterprises." It was written for the entire high tech community "to open up the marketing decision making during this [crossing] period so that everyone on the management team can participate in the marketing process." In Chasm, Moore isolates and then corrects what he describes as a "fundamental flaw in the prevailing high-tech marketing model": the notion that rapid mainstream growth could follow continuously on the heels of early market success.

In his subsequent book, Inside the Tornado, Moore's use of the "tornado" metaphor correctly suggests that turbulence of unprecedented magnitude has occurred within the global marketplace which the WWW and the Internet have created. Moreover, such turbulence is certain to intensify. Which companies will survive? Why? I have only one (minor) quarrel with the way these two books have been promoted. True, they provide great insights into marketing within the high technology industry. However, in my opinion, all e-commerce (especially B2B and, even more importantly, B2B2C) will be centrally involved in that industry. Moreover, the marketing strategies suggested are relevant to virtually (no pun intended) any organization -- regardless of size or nature -- which seeks to create or increase demand for what it sells...whatever that may be. I consider both books "must reading." Those who share my high regard for one or both are strongly urged to read Moore's more recent business classic, Living on the Fault Line.