Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers [Paperback]

Geoffrey A. Moore (Author), Regis McKenna (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1999

Here is the bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for brining cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This revised and updated edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Author Geoffrey Moore makes the case that high-tech products require marketing strategies that differ from those in other industries. His chasm theory describes how high-tech products initially sell well, mainly to a technically literate customer base, but then hit a lull as marketing professionals try to cross the chasm to mainstream buyers. This pattern, says Moore, is unique to the high-tech industry.

Moore suggests remedies for the problem that can help businesses meet their long-term goals. He coaches marketing professionals on how to move slowly through the gulf, teaching them to create profiles and target specific segments of the population rather than trying to plow right into the mainstream. He cites examples of successful chasm crossings by such companies as Apple, Tandem, Oracle, and Sun, showing what they all had in common and exposing the different weaknesses in their strategies. Moore also assigns responsibility for success to programmers and developers by suggesting they design a "whole product model." Here, because integration tasks are daunting to the mainstream market, all the components of a technological product must be in one package. Moore also describes strategies for competing with rival companies and assessing the best distribution channels for penetrating the target market.

Written not just for marketing specialists but for all employees whose futures ride on the success of a technical product, Crossing the Chasm delivers crucial information in an engaging, readable tone. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Scientific American

Moore provides an invaluable service to high-tech entrepreneurs and investors: he has identified the weak link in the marketing chain which makes the success of such ventures so unpredictable, and he outlines proven, specific techniques to address this challenge. At a time when the high-tech community in the U.S. cedes much of its once-held manufacturing advantage to the Far East and elsewhere, it is critical that these U.S. enterprises must retain superior marketing as a competitive advantage. Crossing the Chasm provides critical information for achieving this end.

About the Author:

Formerly a partner with Regis McKenna Inc., Geoffrey A. Moore is now president of his own firm, Geoffrey Moore Consulting, and founder of The Chasm Group. He has consulted with over 30 high tech corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Apple, AT&T, Oracle, IBM, and Samsung. Moore is also the author of Inside the Tornado ) which details market dynamics of hypergrowth, and explains how to pool resources, gain supporters during pre-tornado phase, then how to unleash them once the tornado hits. He holds a degree in literature from Stanford University and the University of Washington. Moore is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and trade shows and also lectures at business schools, where Crossing the Chasm is often a required textbook. He lives with his wife Marie in Palo Alto, California. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harperbusiness; Revised edition (July 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066620023
• ISBN-13: 978-0066620022
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #332,081 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Managing Director, Geoffrey Moore Consulting
Venture Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures
Chairman Emeritus, TCG Advisors, Chasm Institute, and Chasm Group
Member of the Board of Directors, Akamai Technologies and several pre-IPO Companies

Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker and business advisor to many of the leading companies in the high-tech sector, including Cisco, Cognizant, Compuware, HP, Microsoft, SAP, and Yahoo!.

Geoffrey divides his time between consulting on strategy and transformation challenges with senior executives and speaking internationally on those same topics. His latest book Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future from the Pull of the Past, keeps this intent in mind and is the result of his years of experience working with large enterprises.

Escape Velocity is Moore's sixth book for business leaders in the high-tech sector. His first book, Crossing the Chasm, which addresses the challenges of gaining initial adoption for disruptive innovations, continues to be a best seller and required reading in business schools and entrepreneurship curricula. Moore wrote four subsequent books which addressed the challenges faced by management when competing in hyper-growth markets (Inside the Tornado) and those faced by investors when managing a high-tech stock portfolio (The Gorilla Game). The two additional books both address the organizational challenges faced by established enterprises, in one case posed by the volatility of the technology sector overall (Living on the Fault Line), in the other by the need to reignite innovation in mature franchises (Dealing with Darwin). Escape Velocity rounds out these efforts in service to established enterprises by laying out a comprehensive program for engaging with next-generation trends while maintaining their core franchises.

Moore is an active public speaker who gives between 30 and 60 speeches per year, split roughly evenly between industry events and company-specific meetings. His speaking practice is global, addressing a spectrum of topics of interest to the high-tech sector, including high-tech market dynamics, business strategies, innovation, organizational development, and industry futures.

Earlier in his career, he was a principal and partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., a leading high tech marketing strategy and communications company, and for the decade prior, a sales and marketing executive in the software industry. He has a bachelor's degree from Stanford and a doctorate from the University of Washington, both in English Literature.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

180 of 186 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars two good points, but a longwinded book February 19, 2002

By Bob Carpenter

Format:Paperback

Moore's primary point in this book is that the early adopters of a technology are not necessarily the same as the mainstream market. Moore points out that early adapters often buy things because they're cool, not for practical reasons. Early adapters deal with pain in the form of bad interfaces, minimal network effects. etc. Following this informal observation, Moore divides the population into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This is his "Technology Adoption Life Cycle", of which the "underlying thesis is that technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that market" (p. 15). He illustrates this with a bell curve with a horizontal axis corresponding to time of adoption. There's no explanation for why a Bell curve; I'm guessing it just looks pretty in PowerPoint. Moore continues with "this process can be thought of as a continuum with definite stages, each associated with a definable group" (p. 15), although actual definitions are notable by their absence. So Moore advises us that marketing to the two groups might have to be different. Complex? No. Obvious? Perhaps. In any case, this observation is followed with 185 pages of examples and pep talks which I found perfectly readable, but without much additional content.

The second point, which is really just as important, is that the way to "cross the chasm" is by targeting a single industry or group of users, a so-called "vertical market". The only way customers who are beyond the early adopter phase are going to buy into a new product is if it is easy to adopt or if it truly fills a perceived desperate need. That is, it looks less "disruptive".... Usually this means a lot of custom integration with industry-specific infrastructure. It's easier to build something well integrated with existing, for say, just the airline industry and their SABRE database backend, than it is to try to target the entire Fortune 500, each sector of which has adopted different sorts of databases. It worked just the way Moore described for my company, where Moore's book was required reading.

You can get much more insight about sales and marekting (as well as finance and logistics) about disruptive technologies from Clayton Christensen's excellent "The Innovator's Dilemma". You can learn more about marketing segmentation and network effects from Shapiro and Varian's "Information Rules". I might be biased as both a techie and a recovering academic, but I liked the more heavily researched, serious case-study orientation as well as the precise, restrained, academic tone of these two books from business professors. On the other hand, Moore's book gives you an excellent feel for the seat of the pants consulting and hype side of the business world, which itself is a useful education.
Moore's book is breezy and highly readable. This is great can't-sleep-on-the-airplane material. And two good ideas are more than you get out of most pop business books. Read more ›

141 of 169 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars great idea but could be summarized in one sentence September 5, 2000

By Philip Greenspun

Format:Paperback

This book illustrates a fault in the publishing industry. If you have a 50-page idea it is too long for a magazine. But it is too short for a book. So if you wanted to get it distributed before the Web came along, you had to drop in words until you reached 200 pages.

Here is Moore's important insight in one sentence: "Don't celebrate your victory in a market after becoming the market leader with pioneer consumers; as the mass market develops and all the competitive offerings have adequate performance, the new consumers won't care about the advanced features that your organization is exquisitely tuned to produce but rather ease of setup, ease of use, and low cost."

53 of 62 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Two Immensely Helpful Companions May 2, 2000

By Robert Morris HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

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."

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Get ready to cross the chasm or you'll fall into it March 8, 2001

By Joanna Daneman #1 HALL OF FAMETOP 10 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Most people who do marketing are familiar with the adoption curve (i.e. Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards.) Companies who create technological products frequently have brilliant success with the first two groups and then fall into a pit trying to get to the pot of gold on the other side of this rainbow, selling to the rest of the curve.

Crossing the Chasm details the important gap between Innovators and Early Adopters and then outlines a campaign strategy for crossing that chasm to mainstream marketing success. The book gives many examples of products that crossed the chasm successfully (such as Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft.)

Time and time again, technology companies fail because they are concerned with sales numbers (to please shareholders or investors) or because of a bean-counter mentality or simply insufficient funding. The author Geoffrey Moore uses D-Day and the taking of Omaha Beach as a powerful metaphor for how to establish a beachhead before assaulting the mainstream. Like the beaches of Normandy, high cost and certain losses can be essential to establishing the toehold that stages victory. Also important is the idea that to reach the mainstream market, vendors must provide the a complete solution, including support. This is an area that high-tech companies typically want to skimp on; the Innovator and Early Adopter types are natural pioneers and self-sufficient. These buyers accept a higher level of product problems and work-arounds. The mainstream majority buyers are pragmatic; they buy a product not for its own sake, or because it is "cool." They buy to get a job done and want a product that does the job and does it trouble-free.... A lack of service and complete solutions is one big reason technology firms fall into the chasm with an initially hot-selling product.

The book is not tremendously detailed, but gives clear, understandable examples of how to set up a strategy in order to target a market and select a "must-have" value proposition suitable to drive in a wedge. The most valuable part of the book, in my opinion is the advice on weathering the ongoing pressure of executive management reviews, which can constantly threaten to derail a bold yet workable plan.

This is must reading for anyone in the high-stakes technology market. It's an exciting game, and this book provides important strategies to win. Read more ›