Product Description: The Chasm Group is one of the world's leading high-tech consulting practices, headed by best selling author, Geoffrey Moore, whose books, Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado are required reading for anyone venturing into the high-tech industry.
Now Moore's partner, Paul Wiefels, analyses and clarifies the ideas covered in these bestsellers with a step-by-step field guide organized around three major concepts:
* How high-tech market develop
* How to specify a winning market development strategy
* How to plan go-to-market programmes at different points in the life cycle.
Wiefels' back-to-basics approach presents a series of models, tools and frameworks that management teams can adapt to increase market share and create a sustainable platform for increasing shareholder value. The Chasm Companion reveals formulas drawn from real life that can be - and are being - used to stay on top in any economic climate.
Amazon.com Review: Fans of Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado will certainly be attracted to The Chasm Companion, a step-by-step manual by longtime Moore associate Paul Wiefels that lays out specific ways to apply his popular tech-oriented business principles in our fast-changing world. But even those who never warmed to the earlier works--which proposed a pragmatic path for successfully navigating the ever-moving environment of "disruptive technologies that force changes in both strategy and behavior"--could find this book appealing. Designing The Chasm Companion as a hands-on field guide, Wiefels opens by explaining six "inflection points" in high-tech market development (the Early Market, the Chasm, the Bowling Alley, the Tornado, Main Street, Total Assimilation) that he and Moore insist everyone must carefully watch and properly react to as internal and external conditions evolve. He then outlines models and tools developed in the consulting practice he co-founded with Moore that enable individual corporations to carefully craft relevant strategies that they can align correctly with the appropriate market phases defined earlier. Finally, he presents initiatives (strategy validation, whole product management, marketing communications planning, and field engagement strategy) to help these firms actually implement their plans. Graphics and sidebars help Wiefels drive his points home clearly. --Howard Rothman
More academic, but still very useful The Chasm Companion is written in a more academic style than the books written by Geoffrey Moore, but it has new information. Most of it concerns the details of implementing the ideas introduced in the other books. This book does an excellent job of preparing for implementation with ample information on how to assess where in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle one is, to how to adopt an appropriate strategy, to how to take the strategy to market.
One key new idea was the extension of the Gorilla-Chimp-Monkey paradigm to the King-Prince-Serf model which is similar but corresponds to the case where there is no technology architecture lock-in.
The Blueprint for High Tech Product Marketers I've been familiar with Geoffrey Moore's work since hearing him speak at a Cisco Systems Partner Summit in 1998. This field book is a must for anyone who wants to understand what to do (and not to do) to successfully market a high-tech product at each stage of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, and during the Product Life Cycle. Reading this book has helped me better understand how and why we succeeded (and failed when we failed) at my previous company in the tech bubble of the 1990s. The challenge for managers and executives when reading this book is having the courage and fortitude to apply these principles, even when they seem counter-intuitive.
It is good book but... After reading the Moore's "Crossing the Chasm", this book really bored me. Maybe the language used in the book is the problem. I am not sure. However, I highly reccommend you to buy Moore's "Crossing the Chasm". It is an excellent book.
Repetitive and could be turned into a leaflet I have read "Crossing the Chasm" and "Inside the tornado" by Moore, both very good books! When I first laid my eyes on this book I had a slight feeling that there might be risk of overlap. I think Wiefelds saw this as well and got a good endorsement by his colleague Moore - to state that this is a complement, not a repetition. That the book was published after the dot-com, in 2002, felt reassuring though - a lot of good lessons were probably to be learned for the reader. Ok, so I had high expectations, but felt a slight doubt.
After reading the book I have two statements: 1. The book delivers some more hands on the two books it referrers to, some really good lists. All in all about nine pages of good ROI-of time material. 2. I am very sad that Wiefelds did not listen to his own good recommendation: don't talk about your product as you know it - know your target group! Wiefelds should know that I am not planning on reading this book for fun - I want a high gain/time-quota, not 352 pages that take a week to read, when a 20 page leaflet would be sufficient! Because the book is repetitive - very!
To summarize: The book offers some good hands on tips and lists, but should have been a 20 page leaflet.
Extends beyond high tech Wiefels get to the heart of high tech marketing. Nothing I have read has more insights or is more useful in the practical application of marketing constructs for high tech. Anybody in high tech, indeed in marketing of any sort, can benefit from these concepts.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
