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This book review was one of 3 book reviews I presented in our first shareholder’s meeting of 2008 (back in 19th January 2008). Hence, I have used artistic licence with the post date to put this into context.
Binary Review
This book was originally published in 1991 but was revolutionary in explaining how to market (and plan the development of) innovative products (specifically high tech) :
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The Book
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What we thought
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“Crossing the Chasm”
by Geoffrey A Moore |
An excellent book, that’s well worth reading |
| Full Disclosure – yes, that’s a tracked link to Amazon shown above.
We buy quite a large number of books on a wide range of topics, all relevant to our business in some way. If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon, they’d throw a few shekels our way, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books. Hence, Karma would return the benefits to you… |
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I continue to refer back to this book, despite having read and re-read it.
The underlying premise:
The book starts with the typical bell-shaped curve of customer adoption of any particular product, but argues it is a little different for the high-tech industry – in that there is a chasm between the two distinct parts of the market:
The Early Market (being enthusiasts and visionaries); and
The Mainstream Market (being pragmatists, conservatives and visionaries).
To often, the author notes, tech companies are encouraged by some early successes with the early adopters, and hence scale up too soon, expecting the J-curve to arrive, only to find themselves walking in the wilderness, looking for a beachhead into the pragmatists.
The book presents a whole load of information that’s useful – the following is what I summarised for our management meeting in January 2008:
1) Seed new technology with enthusiasts (i.e. give it to the geeks, who will test it out for you and find the bugs) so they can help you to educate the visionaries (e.g. who are business people who will risk something that is unproven in order to win big)
2) Once you have captured the visionaries’ interest, do whatever it takes to delight them, as they will serve as reference customers for the pragmatists.
BEWARE the chasm in between - we need to cross by choosing a targeted beachhead
3) Gain the bulk of your revenue by serving the pragmatists – by becoming the market leader, and establishing defacto standards. At this stage, the “whole product” is important.
4) Leverage success with the pragmatists to generate volume so that the products are reliable/cheap enough to satisfy the conservatives.
5) Don’t waste your time trying to sell to the sceptics BUT listen to what they say, as they may have valid points!
Even though we operate in a relatively narrow vertical market, this logic aligns with what we have found in the past – and we’re looking to learn from this to make our business expansion easier in future.
Hope this helps you, too!
