Crossing The Chasm

In the 1980’s I had the good fortune to work at Regis McKenna Inc, the premier marketing communications agency serving the high-tech sector. The teams at RMI had tremendous success in helping their clients capture the attention not only the technology press but also the business press and financial analysts, thereby getting them visibility not only with technical buyers but also the economic buyers who fund them.

At the core of the practice was a word-of-mouth communications framework Regis called the Infrastructure Model. If you want to convert person A, ask yourself whom they would turn to validate your claims, and then go brief that person B first so that when asked they can give a positive response. It turns out person B in turn might want to first confer with person C, someone even more expert than themselves, and so briefing person C should come before B, et cetera.

It worked brilliantly. RMI clients got incredible coverage which led to unmatched early commercial successes. But then something strange happened. Fresh off a fantastic sales year, having closed one or more mega-deals and expanded their go-to-market coverage to make sure they would catch the coming wave, these same companies started coming up short. Time after time sales stalled, which meant additional funding had to be raised, but in down-rounds with lower valuations. Some of these companies made it through the lull and went on to be successful, but many—indeed, in retrospect I would have to say most—did not.

What was going on?

That was the question I asked myself shortly after joining the firm. The answer lay in another framework that Regis had introduced to high tech, Everett Rogers’ Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Rogers traced technology adoption across a set of personas, beginning with the innovators, moving on to the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and ultimately the laggards. It turned out that RMI’s clients were winning the innovators and early adopters and stalling at the transition to the early majority.

That begged the question, why wasn’t the torch being passed?

My addition to the model was to characterize the early adopters as visionaries and the early majority as pragmatists, and to show why the former do not make trustworthy references for the latter. That’s because the former are risktakers who want to forge a new future whereas the latter are caretakers who need to manage the current business. Visionaries are all about possible upsides whereas pragmatists are more focused on mitigating downsides. In short, there was a chasm separating these two personas, and word-of-mouth marketing could not cross it.

But some companies did manage to succeed, so what did they do that the others did not? Actually, there was a supreme example starting us right in the face—Apple. Regis had a long-standing relationship with Steve Jobs, and the company was an anchor client of RMI’s. The Macintosh has won the hearts of the early adopters, but the IBM PC had already claimed the allegiance of the early majority.

What could Apple do?

They ended up refocusing their marketing from being “the computer for the rest of us,” a great visionary slogan that was exemplified in their famous 1984 ad at the Super Bowl, to being the engine behind “desktop publishing.” What??? That is tiny market compared to serving the entire human race—why would Apple focus on that? The answer, it turned out, was that marketing departments were saddled with creating presentations and brochures that had to be sent out to be drafted, then resent out to be corrected, and that often more than once. It was not only time-consuming and expensive, it made it impossible for anyone other than the department to create ad hoc materials for specific client sessions.

Couldn’t there be a better way?

Desktop publishing was that better way. It combined Apple’s Macintosh and its MacWrite, MacPaint, and MacDraw software with a laser printer to create the core platform. This was completed by two other software companies, Aldus, who made PageMaker for brochures and such, and Persuasion for presentations, along with Adobe, whose Postscript enabled Apple’s LaserWriter, and subsequently Illustrator, a tool for professional graphic artists. Taken all together they constituted what Ted Levett taught us to call the “whole product.” As a result, every marketing department in the world converted to the Mac, and that solidified a mainstream customer base that persists to this very day.

With that example in mind, I set out to generalize the process around the core notions of focusing on a word-of-mouth cohort of pragmatists all of whom are under pressure to reengineer a mission-critical use case, and orchestrating a coalition of participants to bring them a whole product solution.

The result of that effort was Crossing the Chasm.