Crossing the Chasm

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Summary: Pure High-Tech marketing
Review: 'Crossing the Chasm' and 'Inside the Tornado' explain high-tech marketing strategies and product/technology life cycle. In the 90s, some of the most successful high-tech companies could be distinguished by their marketing strategies. Standard approach to marketing might be fine for other industries, but it has less chance of succeeding in high-tech industry. 'Crossing the Chasm' refers to product's acceptance by mass market. Typical product adaptation cycle would go through various phases that include: innovators (very narrow market), early adopters, (much larger than innovators, but still nothing major), early majority (this is where you want your product to get), late majority (still huge market), and laggards. Now, in high-tech world, there is a chasm between early adopters and early majority. It takes different approach to cross that chasm and get accepted by early majority.
Once you are on the other side of the chasm, be prepare for the 'tornado' phase. Your product/technology will take off with enormous power driven by huge market. You don't want to be at the point where market demand surpasses your supply. At this point your company can grow at hyper growth rate and gigantic revenues can be generated. We have seen this before so many times and some of the examples (Dell, MS, Oracle, Apple, etc...) are known to everybody.

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Summary: PR Wired for the Internet
Review: This book tackles the Internet and the marketing tools needed to master this medium. I liked this, but it was not an easy read. I just picked up Guerrilla PR Wired, by Micheal Levine, and it is much more straight-forward and I am better able to understand the concepts within "Crossing the Chasm" because of it.

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Summary: Right on the Money
Review: Both the Chasm and the Tornado books deal with the fundementals of how technology companies either do or should come to market. As so often with work like this it is often bought and a few pages read - and little is taken on board as to how to implement the ideas.

In my previous role in BT both these books were heavily promoted by PA Consultants who did a load of marketing training for us - but you tell me if you think they were read with any real insight?

The recommendations and points discussed relate to coming to the market through the early adopters and visionaries - then if successful we should be able to move to the mass market. Unfortunately even though we know this to be true intuitively and can prove it's true in the real world - most marketing departments want to go big, mass market, fast.

This is a bible for visionaries, innovators, start-ups, small businesses with a focus on customer relationships - if your in a big corporate, forget it. Nobody will let you proceed like this - it will be too contra to the arrogant,internal focus most corporates have.

If you consider yourself a visionary, manic business missionary - then this is the book for you (just don't expect your friends in big companies to understand what your talking about as they burn their way though millions of unfocused marketing budget!)

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Summary: two good points, but a longwinded book
Review: Moore's primary point in this book is that the early adopters of a technology are not necessarily the same as the mainstream market. Moore points out that early adapters often buy things because they're cool, not for practical reasons. Early adapters deal with pain in the form of bad interfaces, minimal network effects. etc. Following this informal observation, Moore divides the population into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. This is his "Technology Adoption Life Cycle", of which the "underlying thesis is that technology is absorbed into any given community in stages corresponding to the psychological and social profiles of various segments within that market" (p. 15). He illustrates this with a bell curve with a horizontal axis corresponding to time of adoption. There's no explanation for why a Bell curve; I'm guessing it just looks pretty in PowerPoint. Moore continues with "this process can be thought of as a continuum with definite stages, each associated with a definable group" (p. 15), although actual definitions are notable by their absence. So Moore advises us that marketing to the two groups might have to be different. Complex? No. Obvious? Perhaps. In any case, this observation is followed with 185 pages of examples and pep talks which I found perfectly readable, but without much additional content.

The second point, which is really just as important, is that the way to "cross the chasm" is by targeting a single industry or group of users, a so-called "vertical market". The only way customers who are beyond the early adopter phase are going to buy into a new product is if it is easy to adopt or if it truly fills a perceived desperate need. That is, it looks less "disruptive". Usually this means a lot of custom integration with industry-specific infrastructure. It's easier to build something well integrated with existing, for say, just the airline industry and their SABRE database backend, than it is to try to target the entire Fortune 500, each sector of which has adopted different sorts of databases. It worked just the way Moore described for my company, where Moore's book was required reading.

You can get much more insight about sales and marekting (as well as finance and logistics) about disruptive technologies from Clayton Christensen's excellent "The Innovator's Dilemma". You can learn more about marketing segmentation and network effects from Shapiro and Varian's "Information Rules". I might be biased as both a techie and a recovering academic, but I liked the more heavily researched, serious case-study orientation as well as the precise, restrained, academic tone of these two books from business professors. On the other hand, Moore's book gives you an excellent feel for the seat of the pants consulting and hype side of the business world, which itself is a useful education.
Moore's book is breezy and highly readable. This is great can't-sleep-on-the-airplane material. And two good ideas are more than you get out of most pop business books.

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Summary: Don't fall into the chasm of hype
Review: Like many techies, I thought this book offered tremendous insights into the way technology products should be marketed. Earlier this year, however, I attended an industry conference where no fewer than three engineers told me they were working at "disruptive" startup companies and explained that this book was their inspiration for accepting their jobs.

What I saw was a group of gullible engineers who'd been suckered into working long hours for low pay at companies with great short term profits but no future.

It is very tempting to frame your work in the terms outlined in this book, because who doesn't want to work at a "disruptive" startup? Three words: beware the hype. If your manager cites this book, it's time to start taking a look at your work situation!

The book is okay, although it takes way too long to deliver its basic message. Most techies will benefit from it because they don't realize laypeople think very differently from them about their industry, and need this lesson pounded home. Most laypeople can get all the information they need from the reviews posted here.

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Summary: Of The Most Important Business Books EVER
Review: This is probably One of the Best Business Books ever written, together with Will and Vision, Innovator's Dilemma and The Death of Competition.

The thesis of the book is as follows:
There are several groups of customers to whom you want to market your new technology:

1. Techies - Technology enthusiasts.
2. Visionaries - Looking to create a breakthrough competitive
advantage using the new technology
3. Pragmatists - The Herd. Adopt a new paradigm only if
everybody else does
4. Conservatives - Buy after Pragmatists. Exploit mature
competition to negotiate better prices
5. Skeptics - Hate new technology. Will buy only when absolutely
have to.

Now, at every stage of the life cycle, the strategy that causes success in that stage, causes failure in the next. THIS IS WHAT CAUSES THE CHASM.

The Chasm, the Gap is the result of the opposition between the Visionary and the Pragmatist
- Visionary is looking to get ahead of the herd
- Pragmatist is looking to stay with the herd

How Do You Cross the Chasm, then?

I'll let you read the book and find out.

Michael

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Summary: Required Reading
Review: This should be required reading if you are involved in sales or marketing in a high tech industry. It clarifies the mystery surrounding the cause of so many successes and failures in the tech industries.

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Summary: A Must read
Review: If this is not on your shelf and you playing high tech, you might as well fill out the chapter seven papers now! A must must must read for the high tech start up.

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Summary: The Bible for High-tech Entrepreneurs
Review: This book is absolutely amazing. I'm really knocking myself on the head for not purchasing it a long time ago, but I'm glad I did now. Currently, I'm Chairman and CEO for a new high-tech startup and after reading this book, I'm going to redesign our approach to marketing with my other officers. Even though we have not hit the chasm period, we will soon and I feel we are better prepared.

The book is actually very simple. It just defines what the chasm period is, who is involved, how to define what markets to attack, how to direct your marketing/advertising, how to assemble alliances and partners and even how to prepare your staff during this period.

The author does an excellent job being honest and sincere, explaining the good with the bad. This is truly great as he won't leave your company in the dust when you see big problems after when crossing and after you cross the chasm period. For instance, I would not have thought my pioneer sales staff would be not as effective and slightly frustrated after we haved breached into the mainstream market. After Geoffrey's discussion on compensation and staffing after crossing the chasm, I was convinced that I had not even thought about how each employee would be affected. Some solutions are brutal to fix the problem - but honest.

The book clearly identifies crossing the chasm as a war - and that it is indeed. Marketing, especially in the high-tech field, is warfare. This book will give you the strategies and tactics to launch this type of war campaign. Read it and read it again and then give it to your senior officers to read.

One complaint about the book, is that this clearly focuses on companies building software, hardware, electronics, and etc. that will appeal to multiple markets. If you are building software that you can only clearly see one industry adopting, you basically have already segmented your market. You may choose to segment your target market even further, perhaps by location to go with the book (that's what we did). This book does little in talking about that type of innovation, but if you do some thinking and apply the core principles of the book, you should be able to develop a strategy that works really well.

One other point, by no means a flaw, is that it does little explaining what goes on before the chasm period (hints here and there). If you are even unsure has to how to start a new high-tech business, I suggest that you should read this book but look elsewhere for other resources and perhaps find someone with that knowledge that can help.

All in all, this is one amazing book and I highly recommend it to any high-tech entrepreneur. Now I'm going to read Geoffrey's other book, Inside the Tornado.

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Summary: Understanding the Technology Adoption Lifecycle
Review: Crossing the Chasm introduces a new concept in adoption of technology by companies. It addresses the manner in which technology is adopted by customers across various industry segments.

As an experienced sales person selling high tech products to the engineering industry I can identify with some of the concepts elucidated in this book. The most important learning that one can take away is the fact that there is a difference between the customers who buy first and the ones who buy later but constitute bulk of a company's customer base as the technology matures.

One may find the writing a little verbose in certin areas. As a whole, however the book offers new ideas and helps marketing managers address the issue of successfully growing their businesses beyond the initial sales.