The Chasm Companion

Implementing effective marketing strategies for high-technology companies

Wiefels and partner Geoffrey Moore are cofounders of the Chasm Group, a Silicon Valley high-tech consulting firm. This is a guide to understanding and implementing the market-development strategies described in Moore's best-sellers Inside the Tornado (1995) and Crossing the Chasm (1999). The partners have developed a model called the technology adoption life cycle (TALC), which describes how communities of people adopt innovations and integrate them into mainstream life. The chasm phase is a product-development black hole, a period of time in which products that show promise are ignored by the public at large. Other stages described on the path to total assimilation by the culture are the bowling alley, the tornado, and Main Street. The book offers real-life management formulas for guiding high-tech innovations through these treacherous phases of development. Wiefels' experience in the field gives readers an edge in anticipating the pitfalls unique to each phase. His introduction to the TALC is clear and informative; the descriptions of market-development strategies are exhaustive and detailed.

• Part 1: How High-Tech Markets Develop
1. Back to Basics
2. The Basis for Strategy Decisions
3. The Early Market
4. The Chasm
5. The Bowling Alley
6. The Tornado
7. Main Street
• Part 2: Developing a Strategy
• Introduction
8. Finding Your Place on the Technology Adaption Life Cycle
9. Assessing the Sources and Impact of Discontinuity
10. Building a Market Development Strategy
11. Market Development Strategy Checklist: Market Creation Variables
12. Market Development Strategy Checklist: Market Attractiveness Variables
13. Market Development Strategy Checklist: Market Penetration Variables
• Part 3: Taking Market Development Strategy to Market
• Introduction
14. Strategy Validation
15. Whole Product Management
16. Marketing Communications Planning
17. Field Engagement Strategy
• Epilogue: Using This Book
• Appendix
• Worksheets

If you've read the Crossing the Chasm or Inside the Tornado, you really don't need this book. Boring repetetive, even if you have some more hands-on than in the Moore books, I wouldn't recommend this, even if it isn't really bad.