Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
Geoffrey Moore
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 ground-breaking work for technology adoption models for high-tech consumer markets.
Review
In my opinion, Crossing the Chasm remains the definitive playbook for launching disruptive products, a lesson I wish I’d learned earlier in my career. The book’s central premise, that there’s a perilous gap between early adopters and mainstream customers, explains why so many “revolutionary” products fail to scale. Moore’s framework helped me understand why a SaaS product I once marketed had viral interest with tech enthusiasts but stalled with enterprise buyers – we hadn’t built the right bridge.
The “whole product” concept transformed our go-to-market strategies. Now, we don’t just sell features; we design complete ecosystems (training, integrations, support) that address pragmatic buyers’ risks. His “D-Day analogy” for targeting beachhead markets also reshaped how we allocate budgets, focusing 80% of resources on dominating one vertical before expanding.
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