Crossing the Chasm
Marketing & Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers By Geoffrey A. Moore
First published in 1991, Crossing the Chasm is a book that is primarily about marketing, and technology marketing in particular, but such is its resonance that it has become a classic text for anybody seeking to understand the way that new types of products achieve, or fail to achieve, popularity.
Like most business classics, it has spawned phrases that are used every day in MBA courses and conferences the world over. "Crossing the chasm" refers to the process of products moving from the enthusiast to mass market, thereby bridging the gap between niche appeal with attendant small revenue and mainstream audiences with volume sales. Or, in the language of Moore - using earlier writers' research into the "technology adoption cycle" - from innovators through "early adopters" to "early majority", "late majority" and laggards.
Using this as a framework, Moore goes on to explain why some products manage to make it over the chasm and others do not, based on the theory that when "disruptive" products appear, there occurs a chasm between the innovators and early adopters and the critical early majority.
During the Nineties, the book became the bible of technology marketers and a mainstay of business-plan writers keen to prove that their products would not suffer from limited appeal. Moore's thinking is still widely touted today, even if many who lean on it have never opened a copy of the book itself. The laptop computer, for example, could today be said to be at the innovator stage in the 1980s, reached the early adopter stage in the early 1990s, hit early majority in the late 1990s and could today be said to be in the late majority age.
Does Moore's book still hold up today? For many products, yes, but the arrival of the internet and search-related advertising has moved the goalposts a foot or two. There are many sites that enjoy huge volumes of traffic but struggle to monetise that audience. Twitter, for example, where subscribers inform others of their whereabouts and activities, has perhaps 1.5 million users. This would make it mainstream in many people's minds but in a market where much of the developed world is the potential audience, is it really mainstream or is it niche? And even if it is mainstream, or becomes mainstream, how will that popularity translate into revenue and profit?
Moore has gone on to write other influential books that coined their own marketing-speak vocabularies, most notably his excellent study of hypergrowth, Inside the Tornado, but the 300,000-plus selling Crossing the Chasm is his classic.
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