Product Positioning for Different Customer Segments

Many new technologies follow a familiar pattern. They attract a small group of eager users quickly, and those users are happy. The product works. Yet the broader market does not follow, and growth seems to stop. Engineers and product strategists often describe this as a gap that must be crossed before a technology can become part of everyday use. This gap is called the chasm, and this article explains what it is and why it matters for anyone planning how a technology should be introduced and grown.

Technology adoption is not a single event in which everyone decides at once. It unfolds across customer segments, and each segment has its own attitudes toward new products. Some customers want to try something before anyone else, even when it is incomplete. Others wait until a product has been tested by many people and has a track record they can rely on. Because these attitudes differ, the same technology can be welcomed by one group and ignored by another at the same time.

Thinking of adoption as a sequence of segments explains its shape. Early groups adopt first. The next groups follow when they see evidence of value, and the largest groups adopt last. The progression matters because each group's decision is influenced by what happened with the group before it. Trace the path in the figure below: each stage can only be reached after the stage before it has produced evidence that others can see.

Each segment tends to adopt after the evidence from the previous segment has spread. This means early results do not automatically carry over to later groups. A product that succeeded with the first segment has only shown that this particular group values what it does. It has not yet shown that the next group will value the same things, in the same way, at the same price of switching.

The two groups at the center of the chasm are not simply more and less enthusiastic versions of the same buyer. Early adopters tolerate rough edges and often help shape the product. Mainstream customers usually care about reliability, clear benefits, references from people like themselves, and a low cost of switching. A feature that delighted early adopters may mean very little to a mainstream buyer, who mainly wants the task to get done without surprises.

The chasm is easiest to see as a point where adoption that had been building suddenly fails to continue. The early group has bought, and the product is working for them. The figure below shows the path: adoption rises among early adopters, then the curve drops off before the mainstream segment is reached. The drop is not evidence that the product has failed. It is evidence that the message which worked for one segment does not yet work for the next.

The move from early adopters to mainstream buyers is difficult because several factors pull in different directions. Each mainstream buyer is evaluating the product through needs, references, risk tolerance, and proof requirements that early adopters often never applied. The concept map below shows how these factors feed into one purchase decision. None of them can be fixed by adding more enthusiasm, because they concern what the buyer must see before committing.

Notice that the mainstream buyer's concerns are about avoiding problems, not chasing novelty. A buyer who wants reliability and clear benefits will look for references from people like them and will weigh how costly it would be to switch away if the product disappoints. Early adopters, by contrast, accepted the risk of an incomplete product in exchange for being first.