Crossing the Chasm Quotes

“The number-one corporate objective, when crossing the chasm, is to secure a distribution channel into the mainstream market, one with which the pragmatist customer will be comfortable. This objective comes before revenues, before profits, before press, even before customer satisfaction. All these other factors can be fixed later - but only if the channel is established.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

“pragmatists are more interested in the market’s response to a product than in the product itself. What”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“This material focuses primarily on marketing, because that is where the leadership must come from,”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“there is something fundamentally different between a sale to an early adopter and a sale to the early majority, even”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“The Bots are taking over”
― Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

“Chasm crossing is not the end, but rather the beginning, of mainstream market development.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“When pragmatists buy, they care about the company they are buying from, the quality of the product they are buying, the infrastructure of supporting products and system interfaces, and the reliability of the service they are going to get.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

“Oh, to be sure, there are the get-rich dreams that float in and out of idle conversation. But there are much headier rewards closer at hand - the freedom to be your own boss and chart your own course, the chance to explore the leading edge of some new technology, the career-opening opportunity to take on far more responsibility than any established organisation would ever grant. These are what really drive early market organisations to work such long hours for such modest rewards - the dream of getting rich on equity is only an excuse, something to hold on to your family and friends as a rationale for all this otherwise crazy behavior.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

“the company may be saying “state-of-the-art” when the pragmatist wants to hear “industry standard.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“you get installed by the pragmatists as the leader, and from then on, they conspire to help keep you there.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“Entering the mainstream market is an act of burglary, of breaking and entering, of deception, often even of stealth.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“customers often bend over backward to give market share leaders second and third chances, bringing cries of anguish from their competitors who would never be granted such grace.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“the key to getting beyond the enthusiasts and winning over a visionary is to show that the new technology enables some strategic leap forward, something never before possible, which has an intrinsic value and appeal to the nontechnologist.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“By contrast, the early majority want to buy a productivity improvement for existing operations. They are looking to minimize the discontinuity with the old ways. They want evolution, not revolution. They want technology to enhance, not overthrow, the established ways of doing business. And above all, they do not want to debug somebody else’s product. By the time they adopt it, they want it to work properly and to integrate appropriately with their existing technology base.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“The only suitable reference for an early majority customer, it turns out, is another member of the early majority, but no upstanding member of the early majority will buy without first having consulted with several suitable references.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“One of the most important lessons about crossing the chasm is that the task ultimately requires achieving an unusual degree of company unity during the crossing period.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“definition onto market, which we will define, for the purposes of high tech, as • a set of actual or potential customers • for a given set of products or services • who have a common set of needs or wants, and • who reference each other when making a buying decision.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

“The company failed because its managers were unable to recognize that there is something fundamentally different between a sale to an early adopter and a sale to the early majority, even when the company name on the check reads the same. Thus, at a time of greatest peril, when the company was just entering the chasm, its leaders held high expectations rather than modest ones, and spent heavily in expansion projects rather than husbanding resources.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“Segways are a classic example of this phenomenon. You've seen them on occasion in malls or in airports, looking something like an old-fashioned lawn mower gone vertical, ridden around by someone in a security professional's uniform. Kind of dorky looking, but don't kid yourself. The gyroscopic balance control is fabulous, and the control movements once mastered are graceful. The hope was these devices would become a universal transport mechanism. Why didn't that happen? In a word: stairs. Stairs are pesky little devils that crop up everywhere, and Segways do not handle them well at all. That's what we call a showstopper.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

“Surround your disruptive core product, the thing that got you to the dance, with a whole product that solves for the target customer’s problem end to end. That will keep you on the dance floor for a long time to come. The”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“California is a bad influence.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“the less successful product is often arguably superior. Not content to slink off the stage without some revenge, this sullen and resentful crew casts about among themselves to find a scapegoat, and whom do they light upon? With unfailing consistency and unerring accuracy, all fingers point to—the vice president of marketing. It is marketing’s fault! Salesforce outmarketed RightNow, LinkedIn outmarketed Plaxo, Akamai outmarketed Internap, Rackspace outmarketed Terremark.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“Big enough to matter, small enough to lead, good fit with your crown jewels. If”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“Positioning is the single largest influence on the buying decision.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“There are two keys to this entire sequence. The first is knocking over the head pin, taking the beachhead, crossing the chasm (and chaining together three mixed metaphors to do it!). The size of the first pin is not the issue, but the economic value of the problem it fixes is. The more serious the problem, the faster the target niche will pull you out of the chasm. Once out, your opportunities to expand into other niches are immensely increased because now, having one set of pragmatist customers solidly behind you, you are much less risky for others to back as a new vendor. The”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“To get an early market started requires an entrepreneurial company with a breakthrough technology product that enables a new and compelling application, a technology enthusiast who can evaluate and appreciate the superiority of the product over current alternatives, and a well-heeled visionary who can foresee an order-of-magnitude improvement from implementing the new application.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“the real news is the deep and dividing chasm that separates the early adopters from the early majority. This is by far the most formidable and unforgiving transition in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, and it is all the more dangerous because it typically goes unrecognized.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“You simply cannot spend your way into the hearts and minds of technology enthusiasts and visionaries.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“The single most important difference between early markets and mainstream markets is that the former are willing to take responsibility for piecing together the whole product (in return for getting a jump on their competition), whereas the latter are not.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

“Unfortunately, however, pragmatist customers rarely adopt any new technology en masse. Usually these innovations are taken up first by a single niche, one that has such pressing problems it goes ahead of the herd. The rest of the herd is delighted by this eventuality because it gets a free look at how well the technology plays out without having to take any immediate risk. The niche wins—presuming the beachhead strategy is conducted correctly—by getting a state-of-the-art fix for its heretofore unsolvable problem. And the vendor wins because it gets certified by at least one segment of pragmatists that its offering is legitimately mainstream.”
― Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers