The Chasm Companion: Implementing Effective Marketing Strategies for High-Technology Companies [Paperback]

Paul Wiefels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 20, 2002

In The Chasm Companion, The Chasm Group's Paul Wiefels presents readers with a new analysis of the ideas introduced in bestselling author Geoffrey Moore's classic books, Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, and focuses on how to translate these ideas into actionable strategy and implementation programs. This step-by-step fieldbook is organized around three major concepts: how high-tech markets develop, creating market development strategy, and executing go-to-market programs based on the strategy.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fans of Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado will certainly be attracted to The Chasm Companion, a step-by-step manual by longtime Moore associate Paul Wiefels that lays out specific ways to apply his popular tech-oriented business principles in our fast-changing world. But even those who never warmed to the earlier works--which proposed a pragmatic path for successfully navigating the ever-moving environment of "disruptive technologies that force changes in both strategy and behavior"--could find this book appealing. Designing The Chasm Companion as a hands-on field guide, Wiefels opens by explaining six "inflection points" in high-tech market development (the Early Market, the Chasm, the Bowling Alley, the Tornado, Main Street, Total Assimilation) that he and Moore insist everyone must carefully watch and properly react to as internal and external conditions evolve. He then outlines models and tools developed in the consulting practice he co-founded with Moore that enable individual corporations to carefully craft relevant strategies that they can align correctly with the appropriate market phases defined earlier. Finally, he presents initiatives (strategy validation, whole product management, marketing communications planning, and field engagement strategy) to help these firms actually implement their plans. Graphics and sidebars help Wiefels drive his points home clearly. --Howard Rothman

From Booklist

Wiefels and partner Geoffrey Moore are cofounders of the Chasm Group, a Silicon Valley high-tech consulting firm. This is a guide to understanding and implementing the market-development strategies described in Moore's best-sellers Inside the Tornado (1995) and Crossing the Chasm (1999). The partners have developed a model called the technology adoption life cycle (TALC), which describes how communities of people adopt innovations and integrate them into mainstream life. The chasm phase is a product-development black hole, a period of time in which products that show promise are ignored by the public at large. Other stages described on the path to total assimilation by the culture are the bowling alley, the tornado, and Main Street. The book offers real-life management formulas for guiding high-tech innovations through these treacherous phases of development. Wiefels' experience in the field gives readers an edge in anticipating the pitfalls unique to each phase. His introduction to the TALC is clear and informative; the descriptions of market-development strategies are exhaustive and detailed. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness; 1st edition (August 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066620554
• ISBN-13: 978-0066620558
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,065,611 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Repetitive and could be turned into a leaflet, November 7, 2004

By 

Hampus Jakobsson (Sweden) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Chasm Companion: Implementing Effective Marketing Strategies for High-Technology Companies (Paperback)

I have read "Crossing the Chasm" and "Inside the tornado" by Moore, both very good books! When I first laid my eyes on this book I had a slight feeling that there might be risk of overlap. I think Wiefelds saw this as well and got a good endorsement by his colleague Moore - to state that this is a complement, not a repetition. That the book was published after the dot-com, in 2002, felt reassuring though - a lot of good lessons were probably to be learned for the reader. Ok, so I had high expectations, but felt a slight doubt.

After reading the book I have two statements:
1. The book delivers some more hands on the two books it referrers to, some really good lists. All in all about nine pages of good ROI-of time material.
2. I am very sad that Wiefelds did not listen to his own good recommendation: don't talk about your product as you know it - know your target group! Wiefelds should know that I am not planning on reading this book for fun - I want a high gain/time-quota, not 352 pages that take a week to read, when a 20 page leaflet would be sufficient! Because the book is repetitive - very!

To summarize:
The book offers some good hands on tips and lists, but should have been a 20 page leaflet.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tough Marketing Decisions Made Easier, November 20, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Chasm Companion: Implementing Effective Marketing Strategies for High-Technology Companies (Paperback)

Paul Wiefels has given a gift to marketing and technology executives by doing an extraordinarily difficult thing: adding yet more value to some of the most valuable marketing strategy books ever written (Geoffrey Moore's). For both readers and non-readers of Moore's books (Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, and others), The Chasm Companion is an immensely useful how-to guide to successfully marketing technology products and services. It provides thoughtful and provocative connective tissue between Moore's books for those who are already Chasm devotees, but doesn't rely on the reader already having familiarity with Moore for this book to be completely understandable and immediately actionable. The author's intimate experience with difficult technology marketing decisions saturates each chapter with a pragmatic perspective often missing from consultant-authored books. The "field guide" format insures that theory consistently supports rather than trumps practice and execution. As a strategy consultant and former Fortune 100 marketing executive, I highly recommend reading The Chasm Companion before your competitors do.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More academic, but still very useful, February 28, 2008

By 

Eric Kassan (Las Vegas, NV USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Chasm Companion: A Field Guide to Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado (Revised) (Paperback)

The Chasm Companion is written in a more academic style than the books written by Geoffrey Moore, but it has new information. Most of it concerns the details of implementing the ideas introduced in the other books. This book does an excellent job of preparing for implementation with ample information on how to assess where in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle one is, to how to adopt an appropriate strategy, to how to take the strategy to market.

One key new idea was the extension of the Gorilla-Chimp-Monkey paradigm to the King-Prince-Serf model which is similar but corresponds to the case where there is no technology architecture lock-in.