|
Crossing The Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (平装)
by Geoffrey Moore
| Category:
Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Hi-tech |
| Market price: ¥ 198.00
MSL price:
¥ 158.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
In Stock |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A never-out-of-date classic for the library of every technology marketing executive. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
|
| |
AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 7 items |
|
|
Donna Brewington (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
While this book (as Moore states) is unabashedly geared toward the high tech industry, I believe entrepreneurs in general, and anyone engaged in bringing forward innovative products, services or ideas will probably find some value here. Given that high tech is, as Moore describes, a "microcosm of larger industrial trends," the marketing strategies are relevant to almost any organization that seeks to create or increase demand for what it sells.
This book requires careful, but not arduous, reading. Brilliant analogies, dry humor, accessible examples and very lucid explanations help to drive home the concepts. Outside of high tech, those engaged in B2B marketing will more readily be able to translate the concepts from this book into their environments. Others will need to translate more heavily to apply the wisdom found here. You will probably be challenged to rethink, not only how you expand your company's presence in the marketplace, but how you define your market (or target audience). You may end up with something much different than you would have thought.
One very key concept is that the way you market your product to win early acceptance will be vastly different from how you market that same product (and might I add service?) to cross the chasm to the mainstream market. Mainstream does not necessarily imply "the masses," but rather the long-term users of your product. In fact, the decision-maker you are targeting at one stage is completely different than the person that you are targeting at the next, and the two have a completely different mindset, completely different objectives and a completely different approach to buying into innovation. The difference is so great as to be very astutely called a "chasm." Yet, crossing that perilous chasm is the only way to ensure viability over the long-run. As Moore succinctly states, it's "a do-or-die proposition for high-tech enterprise." This could be said of many other enterprises as well. Moore cites examples of how, often, it is not the superior product that wins out, but the one that most successfully crosses the chasm.
As someone who highly values the entrepreneurial and the innovative, and the types of people who embody these attributes, in reading this book I am reminded that the strategies required for an organization's long-term success may not be those that are naturally derived from an entrepreneurial mindset, as much as I hate to admit it.
Of the many eloquent analogies found in this book, perhaps, my favorite is the one that Moore uses to launch the discussion of how to successfully cross the chasm. Using the analogy of D Day (Chapter 3), he talks about the need to "concentrate an overwhelmingly superior force on a highly focused target" to secure the beachhead and expand from there. Brilliant! This chapter alone makes the book worthwhile.
|
|
|
Lars Burgstrom (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
Long established as a classic, the drawing depicting the different classes of customers and their adoption rates are commonly used in the industry. I personally thought I already understood it, just from osmosis. However, reading the book taught me more about the characteristics of those customers, how you gain penetration into their markets, and most importantly how you manage a team and produce a product into those markets.
There are also lessons in there about establishing a beachhead and how to choose your target customer that dovetail nicely into some more modern work around persona identification in software development and the need to identify just one target persona for your application at a time. This is a great marketing book - even if some of the specific company examples are somewhat dated - whose concepts readily translate into not only management but directly into product development and vision.
|
|
|
Joanna Daneman (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
"If you build a better mousetrap" is the old saw about inventing new and improved products. But this adage is completely wrong; if you build a better mousetrap, they DON'T come and buy it and you are left wondering why your product failed to make the grade.
Geoffrey Moore writes clearly about the need to cross the chasm that exists between those customers who buy the latest and greatest and those who hang back for a bit, waiting for..what? They are waiting for an incentive to buy your product for other reasons than "it's NEW!" The problem is, there aren't enough of the customers who will buy anything because it's new and exciting - and what's more, the these customers aren't particularly loyal. The sweet spot of customers are those who wait to see if something new and inventive actually gives them back something of worth, a return on investment, a better way to work, doing more with less, you name it. These customers will often switch to a new technology, but only if they have the right incentive to do so.
If you fail to market effectively to this type of customer, you end up with a pile of boutique products that languish in sales and don't ramp up the profits for your firm. To avoid this all-too-common scenario, many companies are now hiring consultants to teach Moore's methods to their marketing and R&D departments. By "Crossing the Chasm" they strive to market products that will sell. If you are in a tech business, and especially if you are an inventor marketing a new idea, reading this book is a very good idea. In fact, I'd say it's required reading. |
|
|
Donald Mitchell (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
Crossing the Chasm deserves more than five stars for putting "a vocabulary to a market development problem that has given untold grief to any number of high-tech enterprises." Crossing the Chasm is the most influential book about high technology in the last 10 years. When I meet with CEOs of the most successful high technology firms, this is the book that they always bring up. What most people do not realize is that Geoffrey Moore did an excellent update of the book in a revised edition in 1999. If you liked the original, you will like the revision even more. It contains many better and more up-top-date examples, and explores several new ways that companies have crossed the chasm that he had not yet observed in 1991 when the original came out (such as 'piggybacking,' the way that Lotus 1-2-3 built from VisiCalc's initial success). If you plan to work or invest in any high technology companies, you owe it to yourself to read and understand this book. The understanding won't be hard, because the material is clear and well articulated. The book's focus is on a well-known psychological trait (referred to as Social Proof in Influence by Robert Cialdini). There is a potential delay in people using new things 'based on a tendency of pragmatic people to adopt new technology when they see other people like them doing the same.' As a result, companies must concentrate on cracking the right initial markets in a segmented way to get lots of references and a bandwagon effect going. One market segment will often influence the next one. Crossing the Chasm is all about how to select and attack the right segments. Many companies fail because innovators and early adopters are very interested in new technology and opportunities to create setrategic breakthroughs based on technology. As a result, these customers are not very demanding how easy it is to use the new technology. To cross the chasm, these companies must primarily appeal to the 'Early Majority' of pragmatists who want the whole solution to work without having to be assembled by them and to enhance their productivity right away. If you wait too long to commercialize the product or service in this way, you will see your sales shrivel after a fast start with the innovators and early adopters. The next group you must appeal to are the Late Majority, who want to wait until you are the new standard and these people are very price sensitive. Many U.S. high technology companies also fail to make the transitions needed to satisfy this large part of the market (usually one-third of demand). The final group is technology adverse, and simply hopes you will go away (the Laggards). The book describes its principles in terms of D-Day. While that metaphor is apt, I wonder how well people under 35 know D-Day. In the next revision, I suggest that Desert Storm or some more recent metaphor be exchanged for this one. The book's key weakness is that it tries to homogenize high technology markets too much. Rather than present this segmentation as immutable, it would have been a good idea to provide ways to test the form of the psychological attitudes that a given company will face. The sections on how to do scenario thinking about potential segments to serve first are the best parts of the book. Be sure you do these steps. That's where most of the book's value will come for you. Otherwise, all you will have added is a terminology for describing how you failed to cross the chasm. I also commend the brief sections on how finance, research, and development, and human resources executives need to change their behavior in order to help the enterprise be more successful in crossing the chasm. After you finish reading and employing the book, I suggest that you also think about what other psychological perceptions will limit interest in and use of your new developments. You have more chasms to cross than simply the psychological orientation towards technology. You also have to deal with the tradition, misconception, disbelief, ugly duckling, bureaucracy, and communications stalls. Keep looking until you have found and dealt with them all! May you move across the chasm so fast, that you don't even notice that it's there!
|
|
|
Aleksandar Zivkovic (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
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.
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 corporations 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!)
|
|
|
Jennifer McLean (MSL quote), USA
<2007-04-18 00:00>
This is the book that launched my career in technology and drove me to establish a more strategic approach to marketing and business. Geoffrey Moore was ahead of his time and offers priceless information on how to stand back and re-evaluate your market approach. If you know nothing about business strategy or marketing OR you consider yourself an expert, Moore's models stand the test of time and give you the tools you need to not only do your job but offers the insights that can help build consensus within a company. Apply these models to your corporate and product strategy; use it as a point of discussion with other senior executives to FINALLY drive a coherent strategy. This book changed they way I think about the business of technology it will for you too.
|
|
|
Jacques Vaz (MSL quote), USA
<2007-04-18 00:00>
I've been reading this book and since I bought it in July, every chapter seems a good lesson for every enterpreneur who really wants to go into high-end tecnology market. I also teach enterpreneurship at a college in my city and my pupils are computer science students. Because of this book, I decided to change the metodology which I teach them. Really a good choice!
|
|
|
|
1 Total 1 pages 7 items |
|
|
|
|
|
|
