Geoffrey Moore (1999) stated that, regarding a smooth bell curve of the traditional Technology Adoption Life Cycle, there are five groups of high tech customers which are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The way to get these customers is to work the curve from left to right. Since the early majority (pragmatists) and late majority (conservatives) are the two big groups in the middle, to be successful, the high tech companies have to sell the product to them.
Because the conservatives will buy the product when they see the pragmatists buy and happy with it, it’s not difficult to sell the conservatives. But the pragmatists are also the followers; they’ll buy when they see someone else buys. Thus, the problem is how to sell the product to the pragmatists. As the early adopters are risk takers who like to try new things, they drive the high-tech industry because they see the potential to be a leader in the way that no one has gone before. For that reason, it’s now possible to sell the high-tech product to the pragmatists with the help of the early adopters.
However, Moore demonstrated that, in the curve, there are gaps between each group in the accepting the new product if it showed the same way as it was to the group that it left. Therefore, the “chasm” in this book means the gap between the early adopters and the pragmatists. And the “crossing” refers to the ways to get rid of this gap in order to sell the product to the pragmatists.
To cross the chasm, Moore suggested that the companies have to (1) Target the point of attack: choosing target market, (2) Assemble an invasion force: understanding overall concepts of the product, (3) Define the battle: positioning the product and creating the competition and (4) Launch the ...