Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

I've been familiar with Geoffrey Moore's work since hearing him speak at a Cisco Systems Partner Summit in 1998. This field book is a must for anyone who wants to understand what to do (and not to do) to successfully market a high-tech product at each stage of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, and during the Product Life Cycle. Reading this book has helped me better understand how and why we succeeded (and failed when we failed) at my previous company in the tech bubble of the 1990s. The challenge for managers and executives when reading this book is having the courage and fortitude to apply these principles, even when they seem counter-intuitive.

I have been a keen student of the Chasm Group publications for a number of years and this book starts to bridge the gap between the theory of visionaries, tornados, gorillas etc and the application of the concepts in practice. The style is very readable and filled with good "common sense". I have already started using it in earnest

After reading the Moore's "Crossing the Chasm", this book really bored me. Maybe the language used in the book is the problem. I am not sure. However, I highly reccommend you to buy Moore's "Crossing the Chasm". It is an excellent book.

Wiefels get to the heart of high tech marketing. Nothing I have read has more insights or is more useful in the practical application of marketing constructs for high tech. Anybody in high tech, indeed in marketing of any sort, can benefit from these concepts.

It's a very simple and clear framework to keep in mind, with VERY practical results in day-to-day activities of product management (specially for those, like me, come from "techies" backgrounds). It's reccommended to read the other 5 books of Chasm Group to fully understand the concepts, but to start using as product manager, this is THE guide.