- Segmenting the market.Is something that marketers just have to do. It's really a technique and approach for us to figure out what's the best possible product fit to a particular market. Now, typically in environments that are mature in terms of the market, we readily understand the whole universe of customers.
- So it's a problem or it's a task that's very easy to work through. Chasm markets are very different. There's a lot of unknown in terms of who the next customer is, especially as we cross the chasm to go to the mainstream buyer. That is the problem for us as marketers in these chasm environments. It makes it difficult for us to segment the early majority market and the markets beyond that. So to sort of ground ourselves here, let's first talk about traditional ways of segmenting the market.
- As I said before, in mature environments or mature markets, you know, typically who your customer is and you know sort of the competitive landscape. Gives you the ability to divide your customer universe into buckets and or segments where each bucket or segment can be characterized by a particular demographic.
- Maybe it's by geography or type of customer or vertical that the customer operates in. So using that characterization, we can define a list of finalists and we can determine based on some criteria on whether those finalists ultimately are the optimum segment for us when it comes to product market fit.
- Now, what's the problem in our current situation as we're now sitting at the chasm? Well, the problem is that we don't have any real customer experience when it comes to the mainstream buyer or the pragmatist buyer. There's no product experience. We haven't exposed our product to them yet. But what we do know is that the mainstream customer differs from the early adopter in mindset, in adoption, in behavior.
- So our predicament is that we are now sitting at a very high-risk, low-data decision point where we're trying to figure out what is the right niche to actually help us cross the chasm. Now, Geoffrey Moore in his book "Crossing The Chasm"talks about a new tool that he calls informed intuition.Now informed intuition is more right-brained than sort of the left brain approach to traditional market segmentation.
- Remember, if you also factor in the fact that you're probably doing some customer development, and you're having some conversations with early pragmatist customers that you're just discovering, you're starting to form in your mind some personas or some pictures of what those pragmatist customers might look like. And in the end, they become a representation for the market and an abstraction for the niche market you wanna attack.
- As part of the informed intuition process, what you wanna do is to develop a library of possible customer targets. Again, all of these are abstractions. Now, the important thing to note here is you're not talking about a specific market, let's say the smartphone market. You're really talking about within your market about a specific smartphone user, and how those smartphones changed their world.
- So you're trying to identify who the buyer of the smartphone might be. So ultimately, what we wanna be able to do from a Crossing the Chasm standpoint is to identify who that beachhead customer is.And we'll use those scenarios in a way that we sort of whittle them down to maybe one or two beachhead customers. And we'll do that with a rating system. And the rating system is based on scenarios and not so much personas but use case scenarios. Now part of the scenario is who the buyers are.
- You have the economic buyer who's the business buyer, who looks at our problem or looks at our solution as a way to solve their business problems. You have the end user who's actually the one that has the pain or is confronted by the problem on a daily basis. And then you have the technical buyer, let's say the IT buyer who wants to make sure that whatever is bought is technically sound, but at the end of the day, they are not the ones that really are going to make the decision.
- So the other two components are really very important because you're talking about how your product will affect the buyer and the end user. So it really reflects at before and after shot.The day in the life of the user before he actually bought or used your product talks about how the problem affects the user and causes pain or makes him inefficient. The after shot is the day in the life after they've implemented your product and shows the benefits of using your product within his day and how it really does change his world.
- So we're gonna collect a library of these use case scenarios. And then we're gonna have a criteria to help whittle those down then rate each one of them. Basically, to weight each one of them to the point where we can identify very quickly where the optimum niche market might be, and who within that market is the optimum buyer.So, first of all, let's talk about some showstoppers.
