This chapter in the book couldn’t have come up at a better time! Tonight I’m going to see Geoffrey Moore speak at a Texchange event here in Austin, TX. I hear he’s got a new book coming out and he’s going to be previewing it tonight. I’ll be sure to share anything interesting with The B2B Lead readers later this week.

Now on with Crossing the Chasm - I’m guessing most of you have read this book, probably back in the late ‘90s. Ten plus years later we as Marketers are still challenged with crossing the chasm from early adopters to more mass markets.

If you’re working a start up, make sure you read this chapter. As start up Marketers we must remember that the marketing tactics and strategies we used to acquire our initial customers may not work as well for the majority of our audience.

We do everything we can to get these first customers in the door and ensuring they are happy. But this isn’t a strategy for growing into the mass markets. As Marketers we must analyze what is working with these lighthouse customers and use this to figure out our real market.

Here’s a piece from the book I thought was worth sharing, a little something for all of us to think about as we are moving into mass markets or as we are considering a new vertical or market segment.

“In the context of this book, the work marketing means taking actions to create, grow, maintain, or defend real markets, not to create illusions. For high tech organizations that real market is defined as

• a set of actual or potential customers
• for a given set of products or services
• who have a common set of needs or wants, and
• who reference each other when making a buying decision”

I think this is a good basic definition of marketing and a great list of guidelines for us to consider as we are putting together programs for our audiences.

Anyone else have anything that really stood out?