Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials)

Positioning exists in people’s heads, not in your words.

Positioning, first and foremost, is a noun, not a verb. That is, it is best understood as an attribute associated with a company or a product, and not as the marketing contortions that people go through to set up that association.

In the case of Box, by calling out Microsoft as its market alternative, it makes clear that it is going after the same use cases and the same budget inside the enterprise. At the same time, by calling out Dropbox as its product alternative, it makes clear that its disruptive innovation is radical ease of use.

Not surprisingly, however, given its focus on consumer ease of use, Dropbox did not invest as heavily in enterprise features as IT departments demand, and so the search went out for a more enterprise-oriented alternative. Enter Box.

To sum up, it is the market-centric value system—supplemented (but not superseded) by the product-centric one—that must be the basis for the value profile of the target customers when crossing the chasm.

Crossing the chasm requires moving from an environment of support among the visionaries back into one of skepticism among the pragmatists.

However, there are ways to win over skeptics. Even the most skeptical specialists are always on the lookout for new technology breakthroughs. Thus, although you cannot initially get them to sponsor your product, you can get them involved in understanding its technology, and from that understanding, to gain an appreciation for the product itself. Th

In the pragmatist’s domain, competition is defined by comparative evaluations of products and vendors within a common category.

Held summits, councils, and multi-party planning days over the course of more than a year to get the ecosystem aligned both at the executive and the operating levels.