#75/111: Crossing The Chasm

What is it about?

After finding your product market fit, you want to conquer the world! However, often companies fail to, why? Geoffrey A. Moore explains why it’s hard to make the transition from early adopters to the early majority and how to fix it.

What can I learn?

What is the Chasm? On the cover you can see the Technology Adaption Life Cycle. There are innovators and early adopters left to the gap and early majority, late majority and laggards to the right of it. The gap is actually the chasm. The problem that you face if you try to market your product to more “conservative” people, i.e. the early majority.

Find a market segment: The first key step to cross the chasm is to look for an attractive market niche. In a niche people talk to each other which helps your marketing and establishes trust. People will recognize you early and help you to become a market leader in the first market segment.

Deliver the whole product: After choosing your niche, you have to think about what you need to deliver your product. People don’t want to be beta-testers, i.e. you have to deliver them the whole solution. If your product needs integration, you have to offer integrators. If you product needs instructions, you have to offer instructions. Your main goal is to become the best supplier in your chosen niche.

Become the market leader: After establishing your position in the niche, you can go into other areas and finally break into the mainstream market. It’s important to become the market leader or at least the third market leader. It’s important to be one of the bests, you don’t have to be one of the firsts. Moore estimates that you will need at least 25% of the market share to establish a long term position.

Conclusion

Crossing The Chasm is a bit wordy and could be written shorter. The examples are really helpful and make this concept easier to understand. I like it how Moore combined several methods (Technology Adaption Cycle, Whole Product, etc.) to create an instruction to how to cross the chasm. It’s a pretty nice book.

#74.5/111: Scientific Advertising

What is it about?

Scientific Advertising was written some years before My Life in Advertising and is a bit like a shorter and concise version of it. Claude Hopkins writes about writing ad copy and using statistics to eliminate guess work.

What can I learn?

Salesmanship-in-Print: A simple rule for writing ad copy is asking yourself: Does this help your salesman in person? You can derive lots of suggestions from this question. Does being loud and annoying help your salesman in person? Probably not. Does being boring help your salesman in person? Nope. Does offering detailed specifications help your salesman in person? Yes!

Use a personality: Most people see cooperations as soulless therefore you can use personalities. This could be an unreal or real person, like the head of engineering or the CEO. People feel more connected if they can feel that a person is speaking to them.

Free samples to interested: Free samples work if people are interested in your product. That is, it’s okay to collect addresses and names because interested people will exchange their address for a free sample if they are interested and uninterested people are deterred.

Conclusion

Scientific Advertising was written in 1923 and was quite revolutionary. Other statisticians like Fisher created early statistical methods in agriculture and Hopkins began using it in advertising. It’s a subset of My Life in Advertising, i.e. you don’t have to read Scientific Advertising if you read the other book before.

#74.0/111: My Life in Advertising

What is it about?

This book is actually two. My Life in Advertising, the autobiography of Claude C. Hopkins and his famous publication Scientific Advertising. In this post I will review My Life in Advertising.

What can I learn?

Fun is subjective: Claude C. Hopkins was raised in a highly religious household. His mother forbid him seeing plays or playing cards, because she believed that these are diabolic activities. Therefore, he looked for other activities and began cleaning at his school and distributing fliers. He said: “The only game I’ve ever learned is business.”. It’s his occupation and recreation.

Simple, natural ads with a coupon: His most successful ads followed this scheme. Firstly, he said that he was raised as a simple man, so he could only sell to other simple man, which were the majority. Secondly, the ads were natural, i.e. no lies, no marketing speech. Often he described how something was created and built a campaign on this obvious fact. For example, he created a campaign for Schlitz Beer in which he described how everything was cleaned twice a day and the bottles were washed four times. This was industry standard but nobody ever used it in an ad before. Thirdly, he inserted coupons for free samples because he wants to decrease the prospects risk and truly convince them that the product is excellent.

His great mistake: There is a chapter called My Great Mistake where he talks about don’t starting a company on his own. Many of his former scholars, i.e. which learned from him how to create great advertising, started their own companies and succeeded. He said that he never had enough self-confidence. After many years working for other people and agencies, he finally decided to start his own businesses which were successful. However, he thinks that this isn’t an advice for the majority. Everyone should decide on his own where he fits and what he wants.

Conclusion

I truly enjoyed My Life in Advertising. This is an other vintage classic from 1927 and most observations are still true today. It’s interesting how he worked his way up from a fruit picker. Then decided to get a degree in accounting. There he realized that accounting is just a overhead and costs will always be minimized. Therefore he started to switch to the money earners, i.e. into advertising. In the last chapter he wrote that he helps juvenile delinquents to love work as he do which is impressive for this time. All in all a great biography. Recommendation.

#73/111: The Checklist Manifesto

What is it about?

There’s a instrument to decrease deaths rates and infection rates in hospitals significantly. It costs near to nothing. It’s a checklist. Atul Gawande, who is a cancer surgeon, talks about introducing checklists in the medical sector.

What can I learn?

Simple and critical: There’s a lot of research on checklists predominately for aircrafts. These researchers found in over 30 years research that checklists have to be simple and critical. They shouldn’t be detailed instructions. The aim of checklists is to remind the users of critical actions. Like closing the cargo hold on an aircraft or disinfect the working area on a human body before surgery.

Test it: Nobody can think of everything, therefore testing is necessary. Observe your checklists in action and try to improve them. If you checklist is too long, only a few people will use it. If they don’t understand how your checklist will improve anything, they won’t use it. Observe and improve.

Empowering people and discipline: Checklist aren’t about bureaucracy. They empower people and make them more disciplined. You help the practitioners to improve their work.

Conclusion

The Checklist Manifesto is terrific. The stories are thrilling and he got great story telling skills. You can feel how checklists improved their lives and lives of others. Furthermore, it’s pretty short and concise. A similar book on checklists in business is The E-Myth. Recommendation!