Crossing the Chasm

By Geoffrey Moore (1991)

My Notes

Life Cycle

Innovators

• Tech for its own sake; latest and greatest
• Pleasure in exploring
• Fewer requirements, but very important ones
• Willing to pay more
• Serve as a sounding board
• Connect through direct response advertising

Early Adopters

• Visionaries—”imagine, understand, and appreciate the benefits”
• Relate benefits to actual problems
• Looking for a breakthrough (order of magnitude improvement)
• Will take risks
• Least price-sensitive of all
• Easy to sell to, hard to please (manage expectations)
• They find you because they have (horizontal) relationships with innovators

Early Majority

• 1/3 of the market
• Practical, weary of fads
• Not risk takers: need to see well-established references; buy from proven market leaders
• Competition (signal of market maturity) is a “condition for purchase”
• They expect an incremental, measurable, predictable improvement
• Can be loyal
• Reasonably price-sensitive
• Communicate with others in their vertical

Late Majority

• Also 1/3 of market
• Conservatives, stick to what they know
• Not comfortable with technology, even fearsome
• Wait for established standards
• Buy out of fear
• Most price-sensitive (they’re late, they won’t get as much bang for their buck)

Laggards

• Will only use when product is concealed in another (e.g., microchips in a car)
• Don’t bother: they argue, block purchases

Process

• The groups don’t mingle, you have to change tactics for each
• The product is important to the techie, then less and less (conservatives are very service-oriented)
• Begin on a very focused target—”an overwhelmingly superior force on a highly focused target”—before branching out
• Otherwise the message is diffused too quickly, word-of-mouth momentum dies out, and you’re back to step one

Strategy

Identify two alternatives:

• Market (traditional leader)
• Product (similar to your offering, gives your product credibility)

Position yourself as having the benefits of both.

If you can’t find these alternatives, beware. The customer has to have the budget, or at least: “allocated to some brain-dead, ineffective Band-Aid approach to solving what has become a broken, mission-critical process… Else you will lose a full year just in educating the market.”

If you can’t elevator pitch the idea, it can’t spread through word of mouth.