Intrinsitivity

Abstract

This paper reviews Geoffrey A. Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers. It contains the author’s biography, a review of the book’s contents, and ideas derived from reflecting on them.

Table of Contents

1. Getting to Know Geoffrey
2. Getting to Know Geoffrey’s Book
3. Getting to Know Geoffrey’s Ideas
4. References

Getting to Know Geoffrey

Geoffrey A. Moore is a renowned corporate consultant and the author of several books, including Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, Living on the Fault Line, and the book forming the subject of this paper, Crossing the Chasm. (TCG, 2006a) He currently serves as Managing Director at TCG Advisors LLC, a consulting firm based in San Mateo, California. (TCG, 2006b; TCG, 2006c) Geoffrey’s biography highlights a distinguished list of clients, including “Cisco Systems, Oracle, Microsoft, Agilent Technologies, Symbol Technologies, Hewlett-Packard, BEA, Lawson Software, and Synopsis.” (TCG, 2006a)

Getting to Know Geoffrey’s Book

Crossing the Chasm is a book that shows businesses how to successfully market high-tech products and services by understanding and overcoming common problems associated with market response to new and emerging technologies. At the heart of the book is a marketing plan or metamodel that teaches high-tech business owners and, particularly, their marketing executives how to overcome or, if necessary, circumvent potential pitfalls that arise from trying to market new technologies in new, established, or even nonexistent markets. The word chasm is the key word in this book’s title and it refers to what the author might call a psychographic breakdown in which companies fail to complete what the author calls the Technology Adoption Life Cycle (TALC).

According to Moore (2006, p. 9), the TALC is “a model for understanding the acceptance of new products.” More specifically, it is a process created to encapsulate and elucidate the growth and development cycle of high-tech companies as it relates to the acceptance of commercial technologies by market audiences or, again, to use the author’s terminology, psychographic profile groups. (Moore, 2006, p. 16) The TALC is, in turn, a model that Moore (2006, p. 13) uses to explain his High-Tech Marketing Model (HTMM), which Moore (2006, p. 14) defines as “a vision of a smooth unfolding through all the stages of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle.”

The stages to which the author refers constitute the TALC and, thus, rest at the core of the author’s metamodel for successfully managing high-tech product ventures. The TALC is comprised of five stages that collectively represent how technologies are adopted by consumers throughout the product development cycle. These stages are labeled by the author according to the psychographic profile it represents. They are Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. (Moore, 2006, p. 12, 13)

Briefly summarized, Innovators is a stage that represents a group of consumers who aggressively pursue new technologies for their own sake, under the assumption that, although not proven worthy by long histories of trusted implementation, the underlying technology, itself, is worthy of trying. (Moore, 2006, p. 12) Early Adopters represents a group of consumers that is like Innovators in that they appreciate new technologies and want to adopt them earlier than most, but also unlike Innovators in that they are not early adopters of the technology, per se, but, rather, the technology’s potential application as a business asset driving new growth. (Moore, 2006, p. 12)

The Early Majority stage represents a group of consumers who are similar to the early adopters in their appreciation of new technologies, but dissimilar in that this majority sees those technologies more pragmatically as not a potential, but a proven, asset to business growth that has already been adopted by other reputable companies. (Moore, 2006, p. 12, 13) This is, then, contrasted with the Late Majority stage, which represents relatively conservative customers who typically adopt technologies only after they have been proven for a considerable amount of time and has become “an established standard.” (Moore, 2006, p. 13) Then again, the late majority is not as conservative as those in the final stage, Laggards, who “simply don’t want anything to do with new technology.” (Moore, 2006, p. 13)

The HTMM predicts that, as a rule, every new technology must go through the TALC and that this cycle of development is rarely, if ever, smooth. To return to the key word in this book’s title, the chasm refers to a difficult transition in getting high-tech products from the Early Adopters stage of this cycle to the Early Majority stage. (Moore, 2006, p. 19) This chasm exists because of the different respective goals of early adopters and the early majority. As mentioned, early adopters are driven by new technologies, themselves, because they promise what most new technologies promise on principle, which is a new and better way of achieving a given goal. Essentially, new adopters are visionary technologists who love what technology represents.

By contrast, the early majority is a group of visionary non-technologists who, although they love what technology represents, do so only because of what it represents outside itself, which is “productivity improvement for existing operations.” (Moore, 2006, p. 20) The early majority wants to know that some businesses have already adopted a given technology before they commit themselves to adopting it. Moore (2006, p. 20) explains that this creates a catch-22 situation in which the early majority is looking to itself for confirmation but cannot find confirmation because it is looking to itself.

The means of escape from this dilemma is what the author provides in this book. The crux of the problem is what Moore (2006, p. 10) calls discontinuous innovations, technologies that “require us to change our current mode of behavior or to modify other products and services we rely on.” Briefly stated, the escape plan is to “target a specific niche market as your point of attack and focus all your resources on achieving the dominant leadership position in that segment.” (Moore, 2006, p. 89)

References

Moore, G.A., (2006). Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (4th ed.). New York: HarperCollins. (Original work published 1991).

TCG Advisors LLC. (2006a). Geoffrey Moore: managing director. Retrieved November 26, 2006, from http://www.tcg-advisors.com/who/moore.htm.

TCG Advisors LLC. (2006b). What. Retrieved November 26, 2006, from http://www.tcg-advisors.com/what.htm.

TCG Advisors LLC. (2006c). Where. Retrieved November 26, 2006, from http://www.tcg-advisors.com/where.htm.