Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

The bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets is now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing.

With over a million copies sold, Geoffrey A. Moore’s classic has become the definitive model for any company launching disruptive innovations.

Why do most high-tech ventures fail? They fall into the chasm—the vast gap between the first wave of visionary early adopters and the lucrative mainstream market. If you can’t cross this chasm, your technology is doomed.

This bestselling guide provides a repeatable framework for navigating the perilous transition from a handful of early adopters to a profitable mainstream market:

• The Technology Adoption Life Cycle: Learn to identify the five distinct customer segments—from Innovators to Laggards—and understand why the gap between visionaries and pragmatists is the point of greatest failure.
• Target the Point of Attack: Discover how to select a single beachhead market segment that is big enough to matter but small enough to win, focusing all your resources to achieve market leadership quickly.
• Assemble the Invasion Force: Master the "whole product" concept to create a complete, compelling solution by building tactical alliances with the right partners to satisfy the demands of pragmatic buyers.
• Define the Battle: Learn to create your competition and use strategic positioning to make your product the only logical choice for your target customers, making it easier for them to buy.

The bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets—now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing

In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle—which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment.

This third edition brings Moore's classic work up to date with dozens of new examples of successes and failures, new strategies for marketing in the digital world, and Moore's most current insights and findings. He also includes two new appendices, the first connecting the ideas in Crossing the Chasm to work subsequently published in his Inside the Tornado, and the second presenting his recent groundbreaking work for technology adoption models for high-tech consumer markets.