The following is sixth in a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

In order to win the battle for customers and revenue, you must define the battle.

One essential component to building a market is positioning.

Positioning is the image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, brand, or organization.

Despite common misconception (and Wikipedia’s own entry), positioning is not a process but rather the market position itself.  Read more...

The following is the fifth in a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm.

One of the most important functions of marketing isn’t viral and it isn’t advertising and no, it’s not creative slogans. Rather it’s in the fundamental 4Ps taught in every Marketing 101 class: Product.

In order to win the marketplace, you must wire the marketplace. According to Moore, “For a given target customer and a given application, create a marketplace in which your product is the only reasonable buying proposition. That starts… with targeting markets that have a compelling reason to buy your product. The next step is ensuring that you have a monopoly over fulfilling the reason to buy.”  Read more...

The following is the fourth part of a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.

Moore opens with a quote from Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you probably aren’t going to get there.”

The fundamental principle to cross the chasm is to pick a specific niche market and focus all your resources on achieving the dominant position in that segment.

It sounds simple but most organizations fail.

Why?

According to Moore, it’s a high risk, low data decision.  Read more...

The following is the third in a series about high-tech market strategy based on Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

A big, strategic failure that many organizations get into is picking the wrong market. Either, they don’t pick one at all and just see what sticks or else picks a market that is so wide (“everybody with a cell phone,” “mothers over 30,” “all people of a specific religious or ethnic group of a certain age,” “all Java programmers”) that it’s impossible to develop a market penetration strategy.

If your market is everybody, than your market is nobody.  Read more...

The following is the second in a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm.

It’s Strategy Stupid.

This should be obvious, but it’s not.

We’re enamored with the next shiny thing to realize that the basic fundamentals are even more important than ever.

Marketing is about markets. Strategy.

Do you remember the four Ps? The core principals of marketing:

• Product
• Price
• Promotion
• Place

These principles guide all marketing activities, including crossing the chasm from early adopter to mainstream.  Read more...