Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition

Book Preface

When the proposal for Crossing the Chasm was under negotiation, both the publisher and the author agreed that if the book sold more than five thousand copies, it would be doing well. After all, it was a niche book from an unknown author addressed to the somewhat esoteric challenges of marketing hightech products.

In fact, by the end of the decade, the book had sold more than three hundred thousand copies since its first publication in 1991. O f course, publisher and author were delighted. But the more interesting question might be, Why was the book so successful? The answer is a textbook example of the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing, the very practice that the book advocates in its niche approach to gaining mainstream adoption for disruptive innovations.

First of all, it turned out that the metaphor of the chasm and the recommendations for how to cross it struck a deep chord among experienced high-tech managers. Countless readers have told me that, although they valued the material in the book, it really didn’t tell them anything they didn’t know already. Rather it captured what had been for them scattered intuitions and rueful learnings and put them into a coherent set of frameworks that could be used for future decision making.

This, in turn, caused them to pass the book along to colleagues, as much to spread the vocabulary as anything else. Thus the book left the marketing department and began to find its way to the engineering section, where a whole lot of readers claimed it was the first marketing book they didn’t throw away after reading the early chapters. Praise from engineers is praise indeed, and the author was deeply grateful for this response.

This unusual turn of events also caught the eye of the venture capital community, which became a channel for more book sales. Venture capitalists saw in the new vocabulary a means to begin a market development dialogue with their engineeringoriented entrepreneurs. Indeed for whole companies the book became required reading, just to get everyone on the same page.

Professors at business schools then picked it up for their courses in entrepreneurial marketing, which was becoming all the rage in the decade following the book’s first release. Students liked the book because it was both descriptive and prescriptive in clear terms, largely because it communicates the core of its arguments through metaphors, mixed though they often may be. If you bought into the analogies, you pretty much had the essence of the book, and reading it was just a confirmation of what you already knew.