Many years ago at Stanford, I had the opportunity to work with a team of researchers related to Everett Rogers, who wrote the book Diffusion of Innovations.  That book has had huge influence in high tech, because it was the first accessible, mass-market publication to provide a working model of how new technologies achieve market acceptance.  The most famous image is the Adoption Curve (see below), which defined 5 categories of technology adopters: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.  These terms have become fundamental in high tech marketing, and you will often hear phrases like “Our initial target market are the early adopters” in marketing planning sessions.

Since I was involved with the team that developed the Adoption Curve, it became a standard part of my repertoire as a marketer.  Like most others, it structured my views on how to approach any market for a new product innovation.

Then in 1991, along came Geoffrey Moore, a consultant with the McKenna Group, who published Crossing the Chasm. Crossing the Chasm expanded on Roger’s diffusion of innovation model.  Moore argued that there is a chasm between the early adopters of the product (the “innovators”, or technology enthusiasts and visionaries) and the early majority, who while appreciating a new technology tend to be more pragmatic about its application.  As a result, the needs and purchasing decision-making of these two groups are quite different.  Since effective marketing requires selling to the needs of a specific segment, there comes a time when young companies face a “chasm” where the features and marketing that helped them gain their early followers will not work, and thus they need to adapt their business to a new set of customers and expectations.  It takes time, energy, and a lot of experimentation to find the right new model.  But in high tech businesses,  especially prior to the Web, sales cycles tend to be relatively long (12 -18 months is not unusual).  Given that most small companies have limited resources, the number of experimental cycles they can undertake to discover the correct new model is thus limited.  This makes the transition extremely hard – limited resources, limited time and a lot of spinning of wheels until the right model is discovered.  Requires a lot of heavy lifting and long hours – and if you’ve ever been through this, you’ll know why Moore chose to call it  ”a chasm.”   It feels like a huge, almost overwhelming leap from where you are today to where you need to be tomorrow.  Even with a running start, when you take the leap to grow your company to the next level, it’s easy to miss and “fall into the chasm.”

I had been working with the technology adoption model visually in my head for almost 10 years at the time Moore published his book.  And when I saw his curve, I realized that we tend to see only what we have modeled (or had modeled by others) in our minds about how the world works.  I had been struggling with the chasm for all that time, and never saw it, even though it was staring me in the face.  I swore that the next time I had an opportunity to experience something that was at odds with my internal models of reality, I wouldn’t ‘ignore the data’ and make a concerted effort to see past the limitations of my own mind.

So Geoff.  I have one for you.  For web-based businesses, the chasm is closing and I can already see a time in the near future when it no longer becomes a barrier to a company’s transition from a customer base mainly made up of innovators to a customer base of early adopters.  The End of “The Chasm” Is Nigh.  Darwin – and the real-time web – are dealing with it.

The detailed rationale in my next post.  Right now, I need to get onto my day job.

One Response to “The End of The Chasm Is Nigh – Intro”