Crossing the Chasm

In business, technology enthusiasts are goalkeepers for any new technology. They are the ones who have the interest to learn about it and the ones everyone else deems competent to do the early evaluation. As such, they are the first key to any high-tech marketing effort.

Classically, the first people to adopt any new technology are those who appreciate the technology for its own sake.

They are the ones who first appreciate the architecture of your product and why it therefore has a competitive advantage over the current crop of products established in the marketplace. They are the ones who will spend hours trying to get products to work that, in all conscience, never should have been shipped in the first place. They will forgive ghastly documentation, horrendously slow performance, ludicrous omissions in functionality, and bizarrely obtuse methods of invoking some needed function - all in the name of moving technology forward. They make great critics because they truly care.

market is: 1. a set of actual or potential customers 2. for a given set of products or services 3. who have a common set of needs or wants, and 4. who reference each other when making a buying decision.

No meaningful marketing program can be implemented across a set of customers who do not reference each other.

Chasm: the gap between early market (visionary customers) and mainstream market (pragmatists) Crossing the chasm must be the primary focus of any long-term high-tech marketing plan. early market - fad (a radical discontinuity) mainstream market - trend (a productivity improvement for existing operations) exploit the fads and develop the trends Technology Adoption Life Cycle: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards bell curve, a unique psychographic profile - a combination of psychology and demographics Market: A set of actual or potential customers For a given set of products or services Who have a common set of needs and wants Who reference each other when making a buying decision Market segments: Breaking out the natural market boundaries within an aggregate of current and potential sales. The more self-referencing the market and the more tightly bounded its communication channel, the greater the opportunity for word of mouth effect. Early Adopters: The Visionaries highly motivated, driven by a "dream" taking significant business risks with what at the time was unproven technology in order to achieve breakthrough improvements not looking for an improvement, but for a fundamental breakthrough