Crossing The Chasm written many years ago is still as relevant today as it was back then. It is a must read for any entrepreneur. It takes you through the journey of a product and the company from early stages of adoption until it achieves mainstream success, highlighting all the challenges one faces and gives you a broad framework to think through these challenges and come up with solutions for them.
Here are 6 things I learned from this book:
1. Technology Adoption Cycle
Crossing the Chasm adapts from the technology adoption lifecycle and includes chasms in between different phases of the adoption. This forms the basis of the book which holds that, particularly for disruptive products, there is a chasm between phases that should not be ignored. Each phase is characterized by different types of customers (Innovators, Early Adopters, Visionaries, Pragmatists, Conservatives and Laggards) and market conditions, requiring completely different approaches to how you position and sell your product. Being aware of which phase your product is currently in will help your focus energies in the right direction.
2. Be a big fish in a small pond first.
Geoffrey. A. Moore advocates the idea of being a big fish in a small pond first, before you decide to cross the chasm (scale up); your main customers at this stage are visionaries. To do that, one must pick a very specific target segment, which can be dominated resulting in a leadership position. If this market segment was chosen carefully, the benefits of holding the leadership position can be leveraged to gain traction in a newer target segment.
3. Create your competition
If you position yourself as a company with no competition, you will find no market. Customers (pragmatists), in the mainstream market, look for competitors to validate your product. They also pay importance to your market leadership positions you currently hold in the smaller target segments. Therefore, you must find competitors in your market with whom your product can be compared to, thereby allowing you to articulate clearly the benefits over them, in the minds of the customer. There is always a market alternative to your product, one that is widely used by customers, albeit with different use cases and not solving a specific problem that your product does. Then there is a product alternative, which is a similar disruptive technology alternative that exists either in the same market or another market. By using these two as comparisons, it allows you to create your own competition.
4. Understand the shift in focus from Product-centric to Market-centric
In the early phases of the adoption, the customers are more interested in the product and the underlying technologies. These are geeks, early adopters who do not mind spending time reading manuals and trying to figure out how to use your product. They give you great feedback on your product. As you move long the adoption cycle, the buying decisions are motivated more by efficiency, cost effectiveness, reliability and other market factors. Therefore, it requires a gradual, but eventually complete overhaul of how you approach customers, market your product and also develop your product along the way. Restructuring of product development processes, leadership positions, management structures and marketing departments must happen as you move into the mainstream market
5. Whole Product concept
The whole product concept addresses the “gap between the marketing promise made to the customer… and the ability of the shipped product to fulfill that promise”. As you move into the mainstream markets, the focus shifts more to the services that you can offer along with your product to provide a complete solution. This requires setting up support and partnering with other companies to fulfill these services. The product takes a backseat in terms of adding new features and attention is shifted towards providing the whole product (generic product + services + plugins etc).
6. Elevator pitch
A very useful structure to create, refine and articulate your elevator pitch.
- For (target customers, beachhead segment only)
- who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternatives)
- our product is a (new product category)
- that provides (key problem-solving capability).
- Unlike (the product alternative)
- we have assembled (key whole product features for your specific application).
Links:
Good summary of the book: http://bizthoughts.mikelee.org/book-summary-crossing-the-chasm.html
On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Marketing-Disruptive-Mainstream/dp/0060517123
The Chasm Has Evolved (Youtube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LHnFsqpzMM
