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Title: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore, Regis McKenna ISBN: 0066620023 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: July, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.22
Rating: 5
Summary: Helpful Revision of a High-Tech Marketing Classic
Comment: Crossing the Chasm deserves more than five stars for putting "a vocabulary to a market development problem that has given untold grief to any number of high-tech enterprises."
Crossing the Chasm is the most influential book about high technology in the last 10 years. When I meet with CEOs of the most successful high technology firms, this is the book that they always bring up. What most people do not realize is that Geoffrey Moore did an excellent update of the book in a revised edition in 1999. If you liked the original, you will like the revision even more. It contains many better and more up-top-date examples, and explores several new ways that companies have crossed the chasm that he had not yet observed in 1991 when the original came out (such as "piggybacking," the way that Lotus 1-2-3 built from VisiCalc's initial success).
If you plan to work or invest in any high technology companies, you owe it to yourself to read and understand this book. The understanding won't be hard, because the material is clear and well articulated.
The book's focus is on a well-known psychological trait (referred to as Social Proof in Influence by Robert Cialdini). There is a potential delay in people using new things "based on a tendency of pragmatic people to adopt new technology when they see other people like them doing the same." As a result, companies must concentrate on cracking the right initial markets in a segmented way to get lots of references and a bandwagon effect going. One market segment will often influence the next one. Crossing the Chasm is all about how to select and attack the right segments.
Many companies fail because innovators and early adopters are very interested in new technology and opportunities to create setrategic breakthroughs based on technology. As a result, these customers are not very demanding how easy it is to use the new technology. To cross the chasm, these companies must primarily appeal to the "Early Majority" of pragmatists who want the whole solution to work without having to be assembled by them and to enhance their productivity right away. If you wait too long to commercialize the product or service in this way, you will see your sales shrivel after a fast start with the innovators and early adopters.
The next group you must appeal to are the Late Majority, who want to wait until you are the new standard and these people are very price sensitive. Many U.S. high technology companies also fail to make the transitions needed to satisfy this large part of the market (usually one-third of demand). The final group is technology adverse, and simply hopes you will go away (the Laggards).
The book describes its principles in terms of D-Day. While that metaphor is apt, I wonder how well people under 35 know D-Day. In the next revision, I suggest that Desert Storm or some more recent metaphor be exchanged for this one.
The book's key weakness is that it tries to homogenize high technology markets too much. Rather than present this segmentation as immutable, it would have been a good idea to provide ways to test the form of the psychological attitudes that a given company will face.
The sections on how to do scenario thinking about potential segments to serve first are the best parts of the book. Be sure you do these steps. That's where most of the book's value will come for you. Otherwise, all you will have added is a terminology for describing how you failed to cross the chasm.
I also commend the brief sections on how finance, research, and development, and human resources executives need to change their behavior in order to help the enterprise be more successful in crossing the chasm.
After you finish reading and employing the book, I suggest that you also think about what other psychological perceptions will limit interest in and use of your new developments. You have more chasms to cross than simply the psychological orientation towards technology. You also have to deal with the tradition, misconception, disbelief, ugly duckling, bureaucracy, and communications stalls. Keep looking until you have found and dealt with them all!
May you move across the chasm so fast, that you don't even notice that it's there!
Rating: 5
Summary: A classic in business analysis
Comment: This book works best when read in combination with Inside the Tornado. These two books have also been updated and integrated into Moore's latest, Living on the Fault Line. Crossing the Chasm, like the other books, is about and for marketing within high-tech enterprises. Moore's view is that high tech products require marketing strategies that differ from those in other industries. The "chasm" is the gap between sales to technically literate buyers and mainstream buyers. Moore's book provides well thought out strategies for bridging this gap. Moore disputes the prevailing view that rapid mainstream growth can follow continuously from early market success. Quite different strategies are needed and Moore provides them, illustrated by examples of companies and products that have successfully crossed the chasm. This is well worth reading, though if you read only one book by Moore, make it his latest, Living on the Fault Line.
Rating: 5
Summary: Two Immensely Helpful Companions
Comment: Crossing the Chasm (1991) and Inside the Tornado (1995) aremost valuable when read in combination. Chasm "is unabashedly aboutand for marketing within high-tech enterprises." It was written forthe 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 (and especially B2B) 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."
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Title: Inside the Tornado : Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley's Cutting Edge by Geoffrey A. Moore ISBN: 0887308244 Publisher: HarperCollins (paper) Pub. Date: June, 1999 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Chasm Companion : A Fieldbook to Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado by Paul Wiefels ISBN: 0066620554 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: 20 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary National Bestseller That Changed The Way We Do Business by Clayton M. Christensen ISBN: 0066620694 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: 02 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Marketing High Technology: An Insider's View by William H. Davidow ISBN: 002907990X Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: June, 1986 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Living on the Fault Line : Managing for Shareholder Value in the Age of the Internet by Geoffrey A. Moore ISBN: 0887308880 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: 30 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
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