Crossing The Chasm (Geoffrey A. Moore)

In ICT Entrepreneurship department we are reading lots of books. From my point of view; Crossing the Chasm is one of the best among them. As a small list i can give you the names of the books and i strongly suggest entrepreneurs to read all of them

1- Crossing the chasm (Geoffrey Moore)
2- Blue Ocean Strategy(W.Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne)
3- Made to Stick (Dan Heath & Chip Heath)
4- Inside the Tornado (Geoffrey A. Moore)
5- Good to Great (Jim Collins)
6- Art of the Start (Guy Kawasaki)
7- Rules for Revolutionaries (Guy Kawasaki)

Let’s talk about the Crossing The Chasm as summary. According to Geoffrey A. Moore, who defined the Technology Adoption Life Cycle Landscape, in his books “Crossing the Chasm” and “Inside the Tornado”, attitudes toward the adoption of new technology become significant, any time users are introduced to high tech products that require them to change behavior or modify other products and services they rely upon. Products causing this pattern are referred to as discontinuous innovations. A high definition monitor, with format incompatible with current equipment, is an example of a discontinuous innovation. Continuous innovations, on the other hand, refer to the normal upgrading of products (i.e. a regular monitor with a sharper image) that do not require any changes. A basic marketing model was created based on discontinuous innovations, relating to psychographic buying habits, forming a bell curve with divisions roughly equivalent to where standard deviations would fall. The divisions included:

* innovators - had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented
* early adopters - younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders
* early majority - more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbours
* late majority - older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active
* laggards - very conservative, smalls farms and capital, oldest and least educated



The above model depicts marketing success by winning one segment after another, with each captured segment acting as a reference base for the segment following. Moore’s model shows gaps between all of the segments, with the largest and most difficult gap to overcome being ‘The Chasm’ between the early adopters and the pragmatists.

The fundamental problem lies in the transition from the early adopters to the pragmatists. Careful analysis of the psychological profile of these two groups shows that they do not have much in common. The early adopters like making decisions by themselves that do not depict the norm. The pragmatists, on the other hand, want to communicate with others and put together a good decision. The key to crossing the chasm was derived by studying the fundamental differences between the last early adopter and the first pragmatist. While the early adopter would purchase a product that could deliver an 80% solution (seeing it as only 20% more to go), the pragmatist takes the position of buying when it is 100% complete (a ‘whole product’ as Moore puts it) and can be referenced as working within their industry. There are many pragmatists out there–all in different industries.

Moore’s solution for making the transition is to focus on a ‘beachhead’ and deliver a total solution to one of those niche markets as quickly as possible. Identification of target customers and their compelling reason to buy are keys to fulfilling the ‘whole product’ concept, which will allow you to win over the pragmatists in a particular market segment.

As a summary i can say these but there a lot to talk about. After crossing the chasm, we will be in the Early Majority segment and inside the tornado is mainly concerning about this segment. In my opinion, in every stage of the TALC there are small TALCs. After i finish searching the documents and reading the Inside The Tornado, i will write a summary about it here in my blog.

Wish you all the best and merry Xmas, for muslims i wish you enjoyed during the feast.