Nespresso: victim of a low-end disruption?

Interestingly, the posts on Nespresso are among the most popular on this blog. Every time I write about this product, audience shoots up, so why not continue… especially given that there is an interesting news with the launch of Nespresso compatible capsules by a new company called Ethical Coffee Company (ECC).

It is well known that Nespresso’s business model is mostly based on selling capsules on which Nestlé is able to make a very high margin. This margin is significantly higher than for the traditional filter coffee, Nestlé’s main business. This is in fact the same model as that of ink jet printer manufacturers: you buy a printer at a very low price; it usually barely covers the cost of the printer. The manufacturer makes its margin not on the printer, but on the cartridges, which are (relatively) very expensive.  This model comes from the razor and the blades model invented by Gillette. This model is not without benefits for some users, in particular for those who have limited needs in terms of quantities. In that case, the high relative cost for one page matters less than the low absolute one. What is interesting in the case of Nespresso is that Nestlé has been able to position the product in the premium segment, so they are able to sell the machines at a high price as well, thus having it both ways…

This positioning helped fuel the success of the product and drove its exceptional profitability. It was reinforced by the creation of the Nespresso Club, adding a sense of exclusivity, and the use of actor George Clooney in the ads. In addition, the Club provides valuable customer information for Nestlé, another innovation for a company that had until then always sold only through distribution channels.

Of course, the idea of a high-quality coffee at home quickly attracted competitors such as Senseo, a partnership between coffee house Douwe-Egberts and home appliance manufacturer Philips, or Tassimo. However, despite their success, and quite unlike what Pr Clayton Christensen would predict, these lower end competitors have not been able to really to “go up” and threaten Nespresso’s position in the higher end of the segment.

This could change thanks to the entry of a new type of competitor having a different strategy: Ethical Coffee Company (ECC). ECC’s idea is quite simply to create capsules that are compatible with Nespresso machines, yet cheaper. This is a strategy that has already been successful for printers and that manufacturers were not able to successfully counter. ECC, which like Nestlé is based out of Switzerland, assures that they have found a way not to violate Nespresso’s patents and produce perfectly legal compatible capsules. ECC’s threat should be taken seriously by Nestlé because its founder is no other than Jean-Paul Gaillard, the man who successfully launched… Nespresso back in the early 1990s. Gaillard is the manager called “Yannick Lang” in the infamous and controversial Nespresso case study from IMD written by Joyce Miller and Kamran Kashani. In addition, ECC has raised €20 million in private capital and is already in production.

ECC’s capsules are legally compatible with Nespresso machines, but 20% cheaper. In addition, they can be completely recycled, a very important point as the use of aluminum capsules by Nestlé has long been criticized by environmentalists. Each Nespresso user has probably experienced a growing sense of unease when throwing away the capsules. Lately, Nestlé has undertaken a recycling program but the way it is organized does not seem to be environmentally friendly.

What can Nestlé do? Moving “downwards” is difficult for two reasons. First, because the success of Senseo and Tassimo in the mid-range market means competition is solidly present, with big brands that have strong experience of the business and the distribution network, and for which the segment is core. So expect strong resistance here. Second, because ECC’s entry will quite likely successfully occupy the “value” segment of the capsule market. Third, because it is always difficult for a firm to move downwards, regardless of the competition: margins are lower but the cost base is the same, a sure crash. This would mean hurting the brand, a key issue as the brand, more than the quality of the coffee, is what drives Nespresso’s success since the beginning. It is difficult to imagine Nestlé introducing “value” (ie low end) coffee machines or selling the capsules in supermarkets (which would instantly mean losing 25% of the margin), sitting next to Tassimo’s.

The question is whether Nespresso’s positioning can be sustained. One can certainly expect a “Clooney fatigue”, not to mention the risk, shown recently by Tiger Woods, of associating a brand with a star who is also a human being, and as such subject to image problems. Despite all the talk about experience, Club exclusivity, and choice of over dozens of coffee types, what customers want is a nice cup of coffee, and too much complexity risk turning them off. Even a visit to a Nespresso shop can be an unpleasant experience when facing the snobbery of the clerks. Last time I went there, I felt like a peasant visiting the castle.

Can Nestlé move upwards? One could imagine Nestlé introducing diamond plated Nespresso machines at €1,000 and partnering with some luxury house. Despite the fact that times of economic recession are usually not appropriate for such positioning, this would smell classic “retreat in the high-value segments”, giving away lower segments to the competition, and putting itself into a corner eventually, something that GM has experienced with SUVs.

Clearly, Nestlé seems concerned. The Swiss firm recently sued a French Web site comparing prices for “disparagement” because the site had contended that Nespresso’s capsules where expensive and environmentally unfriendly. This is surprising because these are two well recognized facts. Nespresso is clearly positioned in the high-end of the market and Nestlé gets good margins on it. This is not a crime and nothing to be ashamed about, simply a positioning that has help fuel Nespresso’s success. Similarly, the environmental unfriendliness is still very common in manufacturing, and Nestlé has made efforts recently to address this question, albeit insufficiently. The trial seems to reflect more on Nestlé’s disarray and lack of strategic clue than anything else. Let’s hope the company will find better ways to deal with its strategic problem. ECC is now sold in France through the Casino supermarket chain. Let the consumers decide…

My previous post on the Nespresso innovation story here.

Note: I no longer update this blog. Instead, I am now writing a blog with a slightly different focus with my colleague Milo Jones on geopolitics, strategy, disruptions, and intelligence. Find it here: http://silberzahnjones.com.

The loss of creative capacity as a cause of organizational decline

I was recently invited to give a keynote speech at the 3rd Journées Georges Doriot, an annual academic and practitioners’ conference organized to honor the great inventor of venture capital, and it seemed to me that the topic of this year – Intrapreneurship- was ideal to test an idea that I had had for some time, that of applying the thesis of Arnold Toynbee on the decline of civilizations to the world of organizations.

Toynbee is the author of “A study in history“, the landmark book on the history of civilizations. The book comprises 6,000 pages, no less. Fortunately, a professor decided to write an abridged version, which allows normal people like you and me to grasp the virtuosity and knowledge of Toynbee for only… 1,200 pages in two volumes. What does Toynbee write? According to him, a civilization grows when its elite is creative enough to attract inside and outside constituents. The civilization breaks down when the elite gives way to, or transforms itself into, a dominant minority. When this happens, the driver of the civilization becomes control, not attraction, and its unity ends.

Interestingly, Toynbee observes that the consequences of the breakdown are not felt immediately. The civilization can continue to exist and keep a momentum if only because the logic of control brings an overall efficiency in its working. To summarize, the three key points of Toynbee’s thesis are:

1. The source of breakdown is the loss of the creative capacity of the elite;
2. The consequences of the breakdown are not felt immediately;
3. When losing its creative capacity, the elite gives way to a dominant minority working on a logic of control.

It is tempting to try to apply Toynbee’s thesis to the corporate environment. In doing so, we can define the creative capacity as the ability to successfully create and introduce new products and services (renew its engine of growth). We can define growth in terms of overall economic performance.

Framing: a key concept in the management of uncertainty and disruptions

The fog of war, a long 2003 interview of Robert S McNamara, shows that how one frames an issue has an influence on on how a question can be solved. As soon as they got engaged in Vietnam, the US presented the conflict as a fight between freedom and communism. This happened in the late fifties, after China had become communist and right after the Korean war, in a context in which the communist world seemed to progress inexorably. The domino theory, introduced by the Republican US president  Eisenhower in 1954, stated that once a country fell and became communist, neighboring countries also would. Hence it became crucial to defend any country facing a communist insurgency. As David Halberstam mentions in his book “The best and the brightest”, the US national context also played a role later in the Vietnam process: Harry Truman, Eisenhower’s Democratic predecessor, was accused during the cold war to have “lost” China in 1949 and to have been weak against the communists, particularly during the Mccarthyst period. A longstanding reputation of “Democratic weakness” persists to this day as a result. In the early 60s, the democrats were still traumatized by these accusations that were systematically used by their Republican adversaries. This is the initial cognitive frame with which the Vietnam question was analyzed by President Kennedy’s administration. Right from the beginning then, the administration was prisoner, without being aware of it, from a frame that was in effect imposed by their adversaries. Despite their doubts and mounting skepticism, they would remain unable, right until the very end, to get rid of it.

In the interview, McNamara tells the story of his encounter with his former enemies during his 1995 visit to Vietnam. Much to his surprise, he realizes then that Vietnamese were first and foremost nationalists before being communists. Hence, that the conflict could in fact be framed as a nationalistic fight for union and independence, something Americans could actually have been sympathetic to. He also realizes that there is nothing that the Vietnamese dislike more than the Chinese, thus showing the fallacy of the fear of a great Chinese plot in South-East Asia, and more generally of that of a grand union of communist countries against the western world. A knowledge that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger will use to their advantage in their opening to China to counter the Soviet Union.

Framing the conflict in terms of a moral fight of good versus evil and asserting the inevitability of the domino theory also raised the stake of the conflict considerably for the US, making it more difficult to withdraw and limiting their margin for maneuver. It’s difficult to give up when the freedom of the world is supposedly at stake, but much easier when it’s framed as a civil war in a distant country.

The concept of frame of course also applies to the corporation. It is especially important in periods of uncertainty and turbulence caused by disruptions. Disruptions bring about profound change that require corporations to review the way they perceive and analyze their environment. Any corporation use a frame that is the result of past experience and of what the corporation has learned about its successes and failures. The more the corporation has been successful, usually the stronger the frame and the more difficult to change. For instance, raised in technological excellence, telecom operators denied the significance of internet telephony on account that it was not working well. GM discounted the importance of the Japanese cars in the seventies from the height of its market share. Kodak reacted to the emergence of digital photography by inventing a… digital film (APS) simply because the company was unable to imagine a world without films, and as a result tried to ‘cram’ the new technology into the old, to use Clayton Christensen’s expression. More recently, music majors reacted to peer to peer by framing it exclusively as acts of piracy, and as a result limiting their action to the legal option, instead of taking an open view on the undermining by the Internet of their very reason to exist on the marketplace.

More generally, enabling an organization to change with its environment requires changing its frame. The question, of course, is how to define the new frame and how to adopt it. Some researchers such as Sarah Kaplan show that this can be achieved by organizing ‘framing contests’ between different possible frames within the organization. The chosen frame will be the result of this contest, the process of which creates the conditions for the frame to be properly adopted and used. See a previous post I wrote on Framing here.

Nespresso: when the simplicity of the product hides the complexity of the innovation process

One of my favorite questions when I teach Innovation is to ask participants how long it took for Nestlé to succeed with their Nespresso coffee machine. So what’s your answer? One year? Five year? Well no. The answer is 21 years. Based on a technology licensed from the Battelle Institute by Nestlé in… 1974, Nespresso only became profitable in 1995 after much ups and downs. 21 years were needed to make a success of the Nespresso innovation.

During this period, the project went through severe technical problems several times, a few failed launches, and wrong markets with wrong business models. For instance, one of the first commercialization attempts targeted restaurants. The idea was that a small espresso machine would be appealing to them. Wrong analysis. A small machine saves space but the unit cost of a cup of coffee is much higher than that of a large, heavy-duty machine. But most restaurants have enough space and care a lot about unit cost. Hence the failure. Initially launched within Nestlé, the project is hosted in a separate unit after some time as a result of the widespread skepticism – to say the least – about it within the company. Simply put, nobody believes in it. This is because the product doesn’t fit the company’s business model, which is essentially to sell light products such as coffee or snacks in packages through supermarkets. Nespresso, on the contrary, involves producing and selling a coffee machine and selling coffee cups to machine owners. In addition, the project requires an important budget at the expense of other units who face stiff competition and can’t afford to reduce their own budget for such an uncertain project. Despite the failures, the project carries on thanks the political skills of the team. Until then managed by pure Nestlé lifers, the real break for the project came when Nestlé recruited an outsider – Jean-Paul Gaillard, to lead it. Gaillard was known at that time for having successfully launched Marlboro‘s line of clothes. He had no knowledge of the coffee business but knew how to launch a radically new business unit that broke from the company’s main line of business. He also came from a different culture from the the traditional, rather conservative and low profile Nestlé culture. Nestlé is a very very well managed company that produces profits year after year like a Swiss clock, so the length of the Nespresso innovation process cannot be explained by saying that Nestlé is not well managed. Market studies were negative, nobody wanted the product, but Gaillard ignored them and finally launched the product with the high-end, consumer positioning we know today

And it worked. The Nespresso Club, another innovation, added to the premium positioning and helped with word of mouth and direct marketing. Yet another innovation for Nestlé, the opening of shops, owned by Nestlé. The overall project shows many innovations and significant risk taken by the company. It also shows the persistence of Nestlé, or rather of some Nestlé managers, in the face of persistent skepticism and negative market feedback: 21 years of failures, and each and every year the company soldiers on. 21 years, for a coffee machine! But 21 years giving way to one of the most successful and profitable products in the history of Nestlé. In the first semester of 2009, at the heart of the world recession and despite competition from Senseo and Tassimo for instance, Nespresso sales grew by 25%.

Robert Burgelman conference at Vlerick: cross-boundary disrupters

Robert Burgelman was at Vlerick Management School on February 5th for a conference on cross boundary disrupters, ie existing firms entering industry by disrupting its prevailing rules. He started by summarizing his work on intrapreneurship and more generally his methodology. Initially, his PhD was about communication between the R&D and marketing departments. He realized, however, that there were research projects that did not fit the company’s strategy. Put otherwise, whereas Chandler was predicting that structure would follow strategy, here was a case where structure preceded strategy. When the project was eventually approved by top management, strategy was modified as a result, which meant that strategy had followed structure.

Hence Burgelman’s model of intrapreneurship identified two types of projects: those resulting from the official strategy, and those resulting from the autonomous action of middle management sometimes in opposition to the official strategy. The model was further developed when combined with the work of Hannan and Freeman on the ecology of organizations in the 1970-1980s. According to this view, industries evolve through a mechanism of variation (creation of diversity), selection, and retention (reduction of diversity through mortality). Applying this model from the industry to the inside of an organization, Burgelman showed how a firm could manage this ecology of projects, the basis for maintaining an innovation edge. Thanks to this, the firm is not dependent on the official strategy and preserve the ability to create real options on different strategies.

Then Burgelman moved on to the main topic of the conference. Often, disruptions in an industry are described as being originated by entrepreneurial firms. However, cases show that startups are not often successful in their efforts and are successfully fended off by incumbents. However, their efforts do not go unnoticed and open the way for existing firm in other, adjacent industries, which “recognize” the opportunity and attempt a disruption, but from a much stronger base. The typical case in point is Apple with the iPod. Apple’s growth was constrained in the PC segment, but the firm could leverage its expertise in software and design to succeed where Napster had failed after the music industry’s lawsuits. Burgelman tried to formalize the conditions under which a cross-boundary disruption can be successful: an initial attack by a relatively weak startup fails, but still manages to undermine the incumbents; a stagnant existing industry stuck in business models undermined by a disruptive technology; and a potential new entrant limited in its growth but having relevant assets that can be exploited to cross the boundary.

Still in the case of Apple,the theory does not apply so well to the iPhone: it cannot be said that mobile telephony was stagnant with irrelevant business models and slow moving industry participants. Indeed, if the iPhone has been very successful, it can hardly be said that Apple changed the rules as it did in the music indusry where it essentially set the price for digitized music. Proof that this is an area where predictions are difficult, Burgelman, in his Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal article on the topic was skeptical about the chances of success for Apple, observing that Microsoft was better positioned and, with 10% of the smartphone market, already ahead. Since then, Apple has been able to gain a significant market share and Microsoft presence in mobile phones has all but evaporated even though a come back is in preparation at the time of writing. Another example of potential disruption in a completely different industry was given by Burgelman with Wal-Mart possibly moving in the low-end health-care provision. This is a question that Christensen has explored in the innovator’s prescription, his latest book on disruptions in the US healthcare system.

Innovation is first and foremost about reducing costs

It is often assumed that innovation is about bringing new offerings or methods to the market. In business, there would be a noble side, that of innovation, and a less noble one, that of managing operations. Nothing could be further from the truth. One of the most fundamental aspects of the free market system lies in its ability to reduce costs, and therefore prices.

In his monumental piece "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy", still an essential read sixty years later, Schumpeter explains that innovation is not the capitalist system's distinguishing feature: other civilizations or political systems have been innovative in sime areas as well (think of space technologies in the former USSR or Law in ancient Rome). The real distinguishing feature of the system is its inherent ability to democratize innovation by making available new products to the masses. This is achieved both through its ability to organize efficiently but also and more importantly through the ability to decrease costs. In other words, the symbol of capitalism and innovation is not so much the start-up as Wal-Mart, the low-cost supermarket that saves Americans' mostly low-income customers about $50 billion a year. For these customers who struggle to make ends meet, it's something.

Schumpeter thus summarized the argument:"The capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses… It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort. . . . the capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses." (source)

Unlike what The Economist explains in their must-read article "The Silence of the Mammon", I don't think defending this system in the name of this formidable wealth creation and affordability is defensive or smacks appeasement. On the contrary, it's a perfectly valid argument as it does not pretend to bestow other responsibilities to this system than it is supposed to have.

The distinction between Radical and Incremental innovation is not relevant

The opposition between radical and incremental innovation is one of the enduring themes of the innovation literature, both academic and managerial. While incremental innovation consists in improving existing products, radical innovation is about inventing completely new product, or more precisely new product categories. They are new to the market, but also to the firm that creates them.

Clayton Christensen's seminal book, the "Innovator's dilemma"
shows how incumbent companies take advantage of incremental innovation, which play on their strengths, but are disrupted by radical innovation. Names such as Kodak, NCR, Digital Equipement, for instance, come to mind when evoking the innovator's dilemma syndrome.

Initially, Christensen framed the discussion in terms of technologies, building on the S-curve
framework, (introduced by Foster) which describes the non-linear progression of a technology in terms of performance. In the beginning, the new technology – say the automobile – is less performing than the old one – say the horse – on the key dimensions (reliability, speed, simplicity for instance). But it gradually improves, slowly at first, then more quickly until the time it becomes more performing than the old one. At this stage, the new curve breaks past the old one and the old technology is abandoned. However, several counter examples showed that there were incumbent companies able to withstand a disruption by a radical innovation, and sometimes even thrive on it. IBM is a good example, having gone through at least five major radical changes in its environment (mainframes, minis, PCs, product to service, open source). The distinction between radical and incremental is therefore not a relevant categorization to explain why in some cases, incumbents fail and in others incumbents survive and thrive.

Later on, Christensen refined the theory and defined the issue in terms of sustaining versus disruptive innovation. By that he meant that what matters in a disruption is whether the incumbent's business model can leverage the disruption or not. For instance, mobile telephony is really a radical innovation, a completely new category both to the users and to the operators. However, many competencies required to manage a mobile business are very close to those required to manage a fixed line network. In that sense, mobile telephony is not disruptive to the fixed telcos, but sustaining. This is why in most countries, the incumbent mobile operators are also the incumbent fixed line operators.

If, however, the disruption is incompatible with the business model, then the incumbent is in trouble. This is the case, for instance, with SAP. SAP's is in the business of selling very complex IT systems able to manage the complete business of large, global companies in an integrated way. A typical price tag runs in the millions of US dollars. SAP's business model is a combination of license fee for the software and service fees (development, maintenance, training, etc.) In addition, an army of consulting firms live off this business by selling their own services. A few years ago, a disruption started to develop in the form of Web-based IT solutions, a typical leader being Salesfore. Because it is a pure Web solution, Salesforce is sold as a service (subscription) for a few dollars per month. Salesforce is certainly not as sophisticated as SAP, but for small and medium business it is good enough, especially because you can sign up and start using it in less than five minutes, and one doesn't need any infrastructure or service provider. The real problem for SAP is that its market is saturated and it needs to grow, so the untapped market of small to medium business is appealing. So SAP wants to go downmarket. But Salesforce, being established in the low end of the market, also needs to grow, and by tapping the upper side of its existing market, it can get higher margins. So Salesforce improves its product. Hence the collision course between SAP, going down, and Salesforce, going up.

The real problem, as Christensen remarks, is that it's always easy to go up (same cost base, increased margins therefore very beneficial, and shareholders are happy) but very difficult to go down (same cost base, lower margins, reluctant sales people and partners, unhappy shareholders). SAP's way to address the lower end market is to create a cut-down version of its product, but the motivation to sell it is not there. SAP could also create a clone of Salesforce (they actually have a Web version); the problem is not a lack of competencies. But the result would be the same. Put otherwise, SAP's business model is not compatible with a lower end segment: customers are different, its sales force is not adapted to small sales, the distribution network is different, etc.

As a result, SAP is locked into its existing business model, and cruises in a frenetic inertia mode, while Salesforce grows and grows, moving up in terms of segments. It's unlikely that Salesforce will ever target very large, global companies, but it certainly will be very happy with the rest of the market, which probably represents 90% of the total. SAP will have been reduced to a high-end, highly profitable small niche, just like Apple was in the PC sector. Not a bad place to be, but certainly a missed opportunity to reach mass market.

The transfer of value from content to experience

The disruptive impact of the Internet on the content industry – Music, movies – is now a known fact. The nature of the disruption, however, is not so well understood. Music majors and large media groups have grown out of the necessity to manage limited bandwidth and related resources. Up until recently, physical constraints had limited the number of TV channels and radio stations, which meant that those stations acted as de facto gatekeepers and could select who would go on air and who would not. They worked hand in hand with the majors, who performed the same function upstream. In a world of plastic, launching a new song was very expensive: expensive studio material had to be used, discs had to be physically created and distributed, so artists had to be selected and only a few could be produced. The business was about how to fill available physical slots in the most profitable way. Thanks to these industry players, people in the twentieth century were able to enjoy music, as they had not been able ever before. Radio stations and majors played the indispensable role of gatekeepers and, logically enough, could set up tollbooths to be rewarded for their service.

Framing – an important concept for disruptions

The reaction of an organization to a major disruption in its environment (technological, regulatory, etc.) has long been studied by scholars and consultants. An important concept has recently emerged, that of Frames. The idea is that, when facing a disruption, the organization needs to rethink the way it sees the world. Old concepts don’t apply anymore, new competitors emerge seemingly from nowhere, major uncertainties exist in the marketplace, etc. Consider the case of Kodak, struck by the digital revolution, who had to change from a core competence of chemistry to that of electronics and software. The challenge for the organization is to dump old frames and create a new one, which will guide the strategy.

The concept of frames was introduced in the psychology and cognitive literature, but it applies well to the field of strategy. Among the interesting work in this field, let’s mention that of Clarke Gilbert, from Harvard, who wrote his PhD thesis on the reaction of traditional newspapers to the rise of the Internet and digitization. Gilbert shows how newspapers had to rethink their environment, which some did while other didn’t. Unfortunately, the thesis  is only available in paper form (Clarke, a pdf on your page would be cool). Gilbert is also the author of a working paper titled “Can competing frames coexist” (free download) where he shows that the difficulty for an organization to react to a disruption is not always or not necessarily due to a problem of commitment to its value network that hinders change (unlike Clayton Christensen‘s explanation).
On the contrary, the difficulty seems to reside in the way the disruption is perceived by the organization. If the disruption is seen as a threat, the reaction will be one of rigidity (hence the name threat rigidity). If, on the contrary, the disruption is framed as an opportunity, the organization will react more positively and will more easily embrace change. On this notion of frames, the work of Sarah Kaplan, from Wharton, is also worth noting. Kalpan is the author of “Framing contest: micro-mechanism of firm response to technical change“.
The idea is that when facing a new world, or rather an emergent world where everything is so uncertain, the strategy making process consists in a framing contest within the organization between individuals, departments, groups, etc. If everything goes well, at the end of the process, a common frame emerges that forms the basis of the new strategy. Sarah Kaplan also wrote an interesting article on the cognitive factors influencing an organization’s response to a disruption, in the particular case of the pharmaceutical industry: “Discontinuities and senior management – assessing the role of recognition in pharmaceutical firm response to biotech“. It can be downloaded for free and is worth reading.

Book review: ‘Crossing the Chasm’ or why don’t people buy your revolutionary product

It’s an unfortunate thing that Geoffrey Moore is not so much read these days. Moore has written essential things about marketing new technologies that are as true today as they were ten years ago. In particular, in his book “Crossing the Chasm”, Moore discusses why most companies fail at marketing disruptive technologies. If your job is to market new technologies, it’s a very bad idea not to read the book.

In the book, Moore makes  the following observation: when a company introduces a revolutionary product,
it usually enjoys an initial success with sales with a few key clients, but just when all signs suggest that take off is imminent, sales stall and the product eventually fails on the market. The same story happened, and continues to happen, to countless startups with brilliant products. Why is it so hard to sell revolutionary products?

To answer this question, Moore looks at the well-known technology life cycle. According to the underlying theory, your revolutionary product is first bought by the techno-enthusiasts. These are the guys who buy any new technology, whatever it is, because their passion is to get their hand at unproven technologies. There are
not many of them, they have no budget, and indeed they think they should get the stuff for free, but they prove invaluable in testing the technology and providing feedback. But nobody listens to them, so once you’ve sold the product to the few who are likely to, you’re back to square one. The next in the list
are the strategic (or early) adopters. Those have an entirely different motivation: they buy innovative technologies because they want to gain a competitive advantage. They were the first buyers of SAP, and they bought the first PCs when corporations thought they were just toys.  It is with these guys that you will close the first sales, and start the first pilot projects during which you will improve the product. They are your first source of revenue, your first reference, but their projects are never-ending and you can find yourself completely trapped with a totally specific product if you don’t learn how to say no at one point, unless you want to become a service company.

Again, the strategic adopters are not many, and there lies the problem leading to the growth stall. You will
sign big projects, but never ever think that this is kick-starting growth. There are only so many of them… After a few projects, the source dries up, and you are again back to square one.

The real money lies with the next group: the mainstream buyers. This is an entirely different lot. They
only buy completely mature products that present zero risk for the company. A typical mainstream buyer is the IT manager of an insurance company. He couldn’t care less about innovative technologies and cool stuff. Any new stuff is by definition a headache, and a potential source of problems, not to mention costs.

A common assumption is that you can convince the mainstream buyer with your successes with strategic
buyers. Moore’s luminous insight is that nothing could be further from the truth: between the strategic adopter and the mainstream buyer, there is nothing. No continuity, hence the notion of chasm. After a few successes with lonely strategic buyers, you have to cross the chasm to reach the mainstream buyer. For him, the strategic buyer is not really a valid reference. In fact, the mainstream buyer buys on only one criterion: the reference. He only buys from the leader of the market, because he doesn’t want to take any risk, which
means that as long as there is no leader on the market, as is often the case on emerging markets, he will not buy. He forms his opinion by reading the professional press -as conservative as it can be- , by talking to peers in other companies. If John has chosen Product X and is happy, then I can consider buying X, rather than Y which nobody knows. The result: as long as you are not the leader, you won’t sell anything to the mainstream buyer, which means 95% of the market is out of reach. This is of course a catch-22: because, by definition, as long as you don’t sell to them, you won’t become the leader.

This explains what happens to the usual start-up. When the new product is introduced, it triggers excitement among the techno-enthusiasts. This is the cool stuff of the moment. Blogs and bulletins boards talk about the product. After a big effort, the sales force lands a few big contracts with strategic adopters, usually some R&D managers. First revenues, first references. That’s usually when number crunchers start plotting a straight line of revenue growth, and eagerly send it to anxious investors. Big mistake. Because after selling to the few strategic buyers around, there’s nothing much to sell, and certainly not to the mainstream who are horrified by this new stuff that threatens their existing view of the world.

To move on to the next step, you need to convince them. Usually, they are business unit heads, a very
different population from R&D managers. The kind that ask for you last three annual reports (but we’ve only been around for 9 months!!!), how many people you have in the quality department, and if you’re able to have a dedicated 24/7 support line for their Tokyo office. Of course, you’ve none of this, so the buyer is put off. You’re just to much risk for him. How many real deployments do you have, and I’m not talking pilot projects here? None, Sir, you would be the first! Ah, being the first, the absolute no-go for a mainstream buyer… He’ll just wait until you’re the leader of the market, because then there will be no risk.

So what is the solution? Very simple… in theory: become the leader, and come back to him. How to do that? Simple, and brilliant answer from Moore: reduce your market until it is no more than a micro-niche, because it’s always easier to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.

Once your market is reduced, which means that you have carefully micro-segmented it and selected the best segment, you can target similar clients, members of the same group. For instance, the retail banks in the northwestern part of the US, or the Rap music fans in New-York. If you target similar clients, a successful sale to one client can be leveraged to sell to the next one, whereas a sale to a bank will be useless as a reference to sell to a car manufacturer. So the golden rule is: focus, focus, focus. The counter-intuitive approach consists, therefore, when the going gets tough after the initial successes, not in running all over the place trying to sell to anybody, but rather to sit down and select just one segment, and put all efforts to conquer it.

The segment will of course be chosen based on what has already been sold, by determining which sale to a
strategic buyer can be leveraged to sell to a mainstream buyer – that can happen. Once this is done, approaching the next mainstream buyer will be a bit easier. With this approach, the micro-segment can be conquered. The strategy consists then in choosing the next segment to conquer the same way, such that
the first segment can be used as a reference. After a few iterations, the micro-segment gradually coalesce into a real segment… of which you are the leader.

In summary, Crossing the Chasm is a very insightful analysis of radical innovation marketing, which
identifies the difficulties, explain the causes and suggest very effective solutions. No wonder the book is a best seller, and a bible of high-tech marketing.

The book on Amazon.