- Marking challenges, what are the types of challenges that your startup will be confronted with? It all sort of revolves around this concept of crossing the chasm. The chasm is not a new idea. People in marketing have been talking about it for over 25 years, let's sort of review what it is.
- The chasm manifests itself in a technology adoption curve and that adoption curve talks about how markets and customers are created. There are really two early types of early adopters of technology, there's a technology enthusiast who loves your tech, because your tech is really cool and hot.
- There are visionaries who look at more of the business aspects of adopting your tech. They like the fact that your technology will give them a jump on their competitors in their markets. So it's more strategic. In fact, they almost look at you as a partner, not a vendor.
- Now following them are your mainstream customers and the first mainstream customer is the early majority or the pragmatists. The pragmatists are much more practical in what they're looking for.
- They're looking for something that will enhance their business, and it has to be a solution. It can't have a lot of bugs and gaps in capabilities. The conservatives follow the pragmatists and they're in sort of a wait and see mode.
- They're looking for cues in the pragmatists on what's the right technology to adopt. Now, this is all followed by the skeptics. The skeptics, some people call them the laggards. The skeptics are in the really wait and see mode because they don't trust new products, perhaps because they've been burnt by new products in the past.
- Now, there's a catch-22 in this environment, there's really a dilemma for you. And that's your challenge when you think about crossing the chasm. And to understand that you really have to, sort of, do a deep dive on each one of the different types of buyers. So let's talk about the early adopters. They're again revolutionary in their mindset.
- They're seeking strategic leap forward for their business. And ultimately that will probably be delivered in a flagship application that together, you and the customer will develop. So in that sense, they are willing to tolerate early product bugs and gaps as long as they are the first ones to get the product, and they thus have a competitive advantage over other companies within their market segment. Contrast that to the early majority.
- They are more, again, they are the pragmatists, they're more evolutionary in their mindset. They're seeking productivity enhancement. So they really want a stable solution to a problem that they have. And ultimately, they don't wanna be the first to actually deploy it. So the catch-22 or the dilemma that you're confronted with, is how do you transition between the early adopters in that early majority? And that's driven by one key problem.
- The early majority is so different from the early adopter, that they don't identify with the early adopters. And they're not gonna trust what they say about a product. They also remember, need a customer reference to make the purchase, but there aren't any, because all of the early buyers are the visionaries who the pragmatists don't trust. All of this hinges on something that many people call the network effect.
- High-tech markets are made up of buyers who reference other buyers that have already made a purchase, so that they can feel good about what they're about to buy. And at the end of the day, that's the big dilemma here because there is no networking effect between the early adopter and the early majority. Now, a real world example is always a good way to sort of drive this point home. Let's think about something that all of us probably have in our back pocket right now, which is an iPhone. The iPhone back in 2009 was a big hit with the consumer, but not so much with the enterprise. Most enterprises that were practical in what they were actually rolling out and deploying, were really set on Blackberry.
- Blackberry was primarily an email device, but it was very secure and it sort of just worked. The iPhone was a big question mark for them. However, there were some companies that looked at the iPhone as going to, as a way to boost the productivity of their workers, because it added one new capability that the BlackBerry couldn't support, and that was mobile applications. Mobile Apps would boost productivity of workers and many companies that were early adopters of the iPhone, bought the iPhone or standardized on the iPhone for that reason.
- Now, Apple was able to cross the chasm, because with the help of a different type or new type of vendor called the Mobile Device Management Company. So companies like AirWatch, and MobileIron, they were able to make the iPhone an enterprise class device. So not only did it give email and applications to the user, but it did in a way that the enterprise could live with because it was secure and it fit into their enterprise environment.
- The rest is history, if you think about what you're using, you're not only using your iPhone for your personal world today, but you're also probably using it for work. So what are some of the key takeaway points in terms of the challenges that you have as a marketing organization within a startup? It all sort of revolves around the transition from early adopter to early majority. And that transition doesn't happen because the early majority doesn't have a way to get a reference when they are buying the product.
- The only people that have actually used the product are the early adopters, and the early majority just doesn't, they don't identify with them, they don't trust them. So at the end of the day, your biggest challenge will be trying to navigate the chasm and find that first pragmatist customer.
