Do you need a brand to cross the chasm?

Do you need a brand to cross the chasm?

contributed by BL

Recently, from a conference, an interesting question came to me during a presentation on a series of case studies associated with the Technology Adoption Life Cycle associated with Geoffrey A. Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm. Most readers may not be familiar with the concept I am talking about. So, I will briefly summarize the idea from the book. As for those who have gotten some idea through the technopreneurship courses, please bear with me.

In simplicity, Moore based his idea “Crossing the Chasm” on an earlier theory known as the diffusions of innovations (See Everett Rogers “Diffusion of Innovations). Cutting the story short, the idea is that one can distribute the adopters of any new innovation or idea based on a bell curve. In that distribution, we can break the adopters of the bell curve into five separate categories namely: technology enthusiasts (innovators), visionaries (early adopters), pragmatists (early majority), conservatives (late majority) and skeptics (laggards). It has to be distinctively clear that Moore’s approach cannot be applied to non-technology markets.

The question that caught my mind is how branding will affect the general picture in Moore’s model. We can paraphrase the problem to the following questions:

1. At what stage of the technology adoption life cycle, does branding become essential to the technology?
2. Is branding either a necessary or sufficient condition for a technology in the adoption life cycle?

Since we do not have definite answers, it might be fun to come up with an argument. My answer to the problem is that branding does not matter till the stage of early adopters. It will become important when it reaches early majority. The reason is that a critical mass is required to create the tornado effect. For example, when digital camera was first launched by Canon, it took some time for professional photographers to adopt the technology. Being a disruptive technology, where it can removed the film and also photo-developing industry, they required a brand to stay till more and more users came online with the technology. Now it is virtually difficult to find people using non-digital camera anymore. Branding comes in precisely when a product needs to increase its market size to a critical mass. To answer the 2nd question, I believe that it is a sufficient but not necessary condition for a technology in the adoption life cycle.

References and Acknowledgement
1. Picture is taken from the “Crossing the Chasm” entry in Wikipedia.
2. Geoffrey Moore “Crossing the Chasm”

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