Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials)

When pragmatists buy, they care about the company they are buying from, the quality of the product they are buying, the infrastructure of supporting products and system interfaces, and the reliability of the service they are going to get. In other words, they are planning on living with this decision personally for a long time to come.

The biggest problem during this transition period is the lack of a customer base that can be referenced at the time of making the transition into a new segment. As we saw when we redrew the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, the spaces between segments indicate the credibility gap that arises from seeking to use the group on the left as a reference ba

Fundamentally, marketing must refocus away from selling product and toward creating relationship. Relationship buffers the shock of change. To be sure, the specific product or service provided remains the fundamental basis for economic exchange, but it must not be treated as the main event. There is simply too much change in this domain for anyone

The more serious the problem, the faster the target niche will pull you out of the chasm. Once out, your opportunities to expand into other niches are immensely increased because now, having one set of customers solidly behind you, you are much less risky to back as a new vendor.

The purpose of the postchasm enterprise is to make money. This is a much more radical statement than it appears. To begin with, we need to recognize that this is not the purpose of the prechasm organization. In the case of building an early market, the fundamental return on investment is the conversion of an amalgam of technology, services, and ide

The consequences of being sales-driven during the chasm period are, to put it simply, fatal.

Set pricing at the market leader price point, thereby reinforcing your claims to market leadership (or at least not undercutting them), and build a disproportionately high reward for the channel into the price margin, a reward that will be phased out as the product becomes truly established in the mainstream, and competition for the right to distri

In sum, visionaries represent an opportunity early in a product’s life cycle to generate a burst of revenue and gain exceptional visibility.

Visionaries are not looking for an improvement; they are looking for a fundamental breakthrough.