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Geoffrey Moore’s main merit
was to prove that classic visions of the product lifecycle did
not apply to the field of ICT markets, which are mostly innovation-driven;
more precisely, what he meant was that something extra was needed
to help industrial how new technologies were adopted by new users.
This is a fact: 80% of new products will never make it to the
rest A the lifecycle because the launch is the most crucial and
dangerous phase of the ICT lifecycle.
Most innovations won’t even
manage to leave their R&D cocoon by the way. What Moore has
shown is that this ‘ideal’ lifecycle curve was in fact cut in
the middle by thy great divide, this chasm as he
chose to name it, and he proved that ICT marketeers’ challenge
was to cross this chasm, to overcome this difficulty of turning
just good ideas into real products.
Besides, Moore brought in
a brand-new segmentation, which referred to users/buyers of technology
products and not just products themselves. Some of these segment
names are now part of our everyday vocabulary (early adopter namely).
As shown in Figure 21, which we extracted
from Norman’s
of reengineering of Moore’s segmentation, first and foremost come
to the ‘techno-enthusiasts’, who are ready to buy any type of
new technology as long as the prestige it bestows is high and
visible. Price for them is not a valid criterion, or indeed,
it’s just the other way around: The more expensive, the more exclusive,
the more desirable…
For instance, way back 2000-2001, buying expensive €30,000 plasma TV screens was
highly valuable for those who wanted to be the first to try flat
TV screens (and show them to their friends).
‘Early adopters’ come next.
Early adopters are ahead of markets and they have a good feel
for those technologies, which are meant to become mainstream one
day. They tend to be more realistic than ‘techno-enthusiasts’.
They know they have to wait for a technology to catch up, until
its price becomes reasonable - even though it’s still too high.
The third category of users (right after the so called chasm)
is made of ‘early pragmatists’ who will only start buying new
technology when they are certain that it will become mainstream.
Pragmatists tend to discard gadgets and they have a tendency to
buy that technology which brings real solutions to their problems.
At least, conservatives and laggards only come into the market
when everybody else has, and they are those who really
make markets mainstream or not.
Laggards tend to yield to
peer-pressure when it really is inevitable and when not belonging
a certain object/product really becomes too much to bear. One
should be aware that - according to time and circumstances - each
of us could be found in any of the above categories of technology
users. One may very well be an early adopter of home-cinema and
a laggard for computers or vice versa. G. Moore’s largest contribution
in my mind was to show that a gulf existed between techno-fans
(categories 1 and 2) and pragmatists (categories 3 and 4). He
showed that the real difficulty was to grow markets into mass-markets,
i.e. take then from stage 2 to stage 3. This a great challenge
and the question remains as to the recipe –if any- to take one’s
products safely across that chasm.
Geoffrey Moore describes is
war-like method he compares to the assault of the Normandy beaches
by the allies on June 6th, 1944 (D-day analogy). Thierry
Breton made a presentation at an IDATE meeting in November
2003. In this presentation where he explained Frame Telecom’s
new strategy, he delivered a diagram which can be used to better
understand the penetration of various ICT products and devices
within French households. This diagram shows the 10% lower limit,
below which a market can be described as a niche market (as opposed
to a mass/mainstream market). This diagram gives a good idea as
to which products have managed to cross the chasm or not.
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