Geoff Moore’s Crossing the Chasm revolutionized the way high technology marketing professionals think about how to define and market new products. The major insight was the high technology products don’t follow a “standard” bell curve for market acceptance that retail companies such as Proctor and Gamble pioneered. With many retail consumer products, the amount of sales are directly related to the amount of money spent on advertising. However, Moore and his team discovered that with high technology products there is a chasm between early adopters and the early majority consumers. The really hard part of this chasm is that the product features that appeal to the early adopters are not congruent with what the early majority customers need or want. Many a high technology company has foundered trying to cross this chasm.

The following diagram illustrates Geoff Moore’s chasm:

The other important insight in Crossing the Chasm is the framework of the whole product model. Most high technology product developers stop their thinking with what they themselves will actually ship – the generic product. Moore points out that in order for an early majority customer to buy a product they must have the surrounding capabilities of the expected, augmented and potential product. It is easy to forget that when we buy a generic product like Microsoft Word that we are really buying it to produce something like a letter or a business plan. In order to produce our own work product we also need a computer, a printer, some paper, some ink etc – all of which are part of the expected product. Then the product can be augmented with specialty products like the rest of Microsoft Office to introduce spread sheets and diagrams into our business plan. Most early majority purchasers will also want to know what kind of potential this product has for further development before buying in and most especially want to know if this product has the potential to become an industry standard.

On Geoff Moore’s blog he provides a quick overview of the book looking at the problems of the “chasm” and the solutions for getting into a mainstream market and partnering with others to create a “whole product.”

Books by Geoff Moore