Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials)

If you can get there first, “catch the curve,” and ride it up through the early majority segment, thereby establishing the de facto standard, you can get rich very quickly and “own” a highly profitable market for a very long time to come.

This is a standard pattern in crossing the chasm. It is normally the departmental function who leads (they have the problem), the executive function who prioritizes (the problem is causing enterprise-wide grief), and the technical function that follows (they have to make the new stuff work while still maintaining all the old stuff).

To sum up, when crossing the chasm, we are looking to attract customer-oriented distribution, and one of our primary lures will be distribution-oriented pricing.

To reap the rewards of the mainstream market, your marketing strategy must successfully respond to all three of these stages. In each case, the key to success is to focus in on the dominant “adoption type” in the current phase of the market, learn to appreciate that type of person’s psychographics, and then adjust your marketing strategy and tactic

Visionaries are not looking for an improvement; they are looking for a fundamental breakthrough.

What the early adopter is buying, as we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 2, 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 b

Tactical alliances have one and only one purpose: to accelerate the formation of whole product infrastructure within a specific target market segment. The basic commitment is to codevelop a whole product and market it jointly. This benefits the product manager by ensuring customer satisfaction. It benefits the partner by providing expanded distribu

So how can we guarantee passing the elevator test? The key is to define your position based on the target segment you intend to dominate and the value proposition you intend to dominate it with. Within this context, you then set forth your competition and the unique differentiation that belongs to you and that you expect to drive the buying decisio

Pragmatists won’t buy from you until you are established, yet you can’t get established until they buy from you. Obviously, this works to the disadvantage of start-ups and, conversely, to the great advantage of companies with established track records. On the other hand, once a start-up has earned its spurs with the pragmatist buyers within a given