Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials)

What the company staff interpreted as a ramp in sales leading smoothly “up the curve” was in fact an initial blip—what we will be calling the early market—and not the first indications of an emerging mainstream market. The company failed because its managers were unable to recognize that there is something fundamentally different between a sale to

You simply cannot spend your way into the hearts and minds of technology enthusiasts and visionaries.

Now, the whole product manager is a product-marketing-manager-to-be. The reason she is not one today is that the job itself is premature. Until there is a successful crossing of the chasm, there are no meaningful market relationships or understandings to drive the future of product development. The target market segment manager is off getting these

Overall, to market to pragmatists, you must be patient. You need to be conversant with the issues that dominate their particular business. You need to show up at the industry-specific conferences and trade shows they attend. You need to be mentioned in articles that run in the newsletters and blogs they read. You need to be installed in other compa

At no time is this marketing proposition more true than when crossing the chasm. Prior to the chasm there is some hope that the visionaries will backfill the whole product through their own systems integration efforts. Once the product is established in the mainstream, there is some hope that some third party will see an opportunity for itself to m

are, by necessity, rooted in multiple assumptions. Each of these assumptions has enormous impact on the resulting projection, each represents an experienced but nonetheless arbitrary judgment of a particular market analyst, and all are typically well documented in the report, but also typically ignored by anyone who quotes from it.

What does work for product managers, on the other hand, are tactical “whole product” alliances. These alliances have one and only one purpose: Accelerate the formation of whole product infrastructure within a specific target market segment in support of a segment-specific compelling reason to buy.

The initial customer set for a new technology product is made up primarily of innovators and early adopters. In the high-tech industry, the innovators are better known as technology enthusiasts or just techies, whereas the early adopters are the visionaries. It is the latter group, the visionaries, who dominate the buying decisions in this market,

The key to moving beyond one’s initial target niche is to select strategic target market segments to begin with. That is, target a segment that, by virtue of its other connections, creates an entry point into one or more adjacent segments.