Sublime

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

Marketing professionals insist on market segmentation because they know that no meaningful marketing program can be implemented across a set of customers who do not reference each other.

It is extremely difficult to cross the chasm in consumer market. Almost all successful crossings happen in business markets, where the economic and technical resources can absorb the challenges of an immature product and service offering.

Discovery Framing

Andy Grove’s management classic, High Output Management,

At no time is this marketing proposition more true than when crossing the chasm. Prior to the chasm there is some hope that the visionaries will backfill the whole product through their own systems integration efforts. Once the product is established in the mainstream, there is some hope that some third party will see an opportunity for itself to m

making the marketing and communications transition between any two adoption segments is normally excruciatingly awkward because you must adopt new strategies just at the time you have become most comfortable with the old ones. The biggest problem during this transition period is the lack of a customer base that can be referenced at the time of maki

Companies just starting out, as well as any marketing program operating with scarce resources, must operate in a tightly bound market to be competitive. Otherwise their “hot” marketing messages get diffused too quickly, the chain reaction of word-of-mouth communication dies out, and the sales force is back to selling “cold.” This is a classic chasm

For all these reasons—for whole product leverage, for word-of-mouth effectiveness, and for perceived market leadership—it is critical that, when crossing the chasm, you focus exclusively on achieving a dominant position in one or two narrowly bounded market segments. If you do not commit fully to this goal, the odds are overwhelmingly against your