Thought Leadership Marketing
Geoffrey Moore
Author, speaker, advisor, best known for Crossing the Chasm, Zone to Win and The Infinite Staircase. Board Member of nLight, WorkFusion, and Phaidra. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute.
The Key to Early Market Success
Thought leadership marketing can sound a bit esoteric, but don’t be fooled. In the world of disruptive innovation, where the Technology Adoption Life Cycle is king, it is key to early market success. Here’s why.
In the early market, you have an amazing new product, but you also have a problem. No one has any budget to buy it. This makes for a very long sales cycle indeed, often having to span a full year just to get into next year’s budgeting cycle. And getting traction even then is no mean feat, given all the competition from incumbents to get funded first. So, what is an entrepreneur to do?
Change the rules!
Budgeting is allocated based on the executive team’s current understanding of their marketplace and company capabilities. Most of the time this translates into a “more of the same” approach, with one or two strategic twists. That won’t cut it for your purposes. You need the team to rethink its priorities from the ground up.
This is where thought leadership marketing comes in. It’s defining characteristic is that it reframes the market landscape by showing how disruptive changes will irrevocably shift the balance of power. It’s only a matter of time before affected enterprises will have to change their budgeting priorities. The only question is when.
If you are able to land this provocation in a credible way, you will activate the Technology Adoption Life Cycle in your target market, which will unfold in the following sequence:
- Early Adopters: “We believe what you believe, and we are going to get ahead of this curve.”
- Pragmatists in Pain: “We need what you have. Your innovation breaks the back of a problem we cannot solve by conventional means.”
- Pragmatists on Plan: “We want what they have. Your innovation has become the next big thing, and we don’t want to be left behind.”
- Conservatives: “We like what we have. Can you tweak it so we get at least some of the benefits of the next generation technology?”
In the early market, you are focused solely on the early adopters. You are looking for people who believe what you believe. The goal of thought leadership marketing is to awaken and inspire these folks to take the first step. And that first step is to reallocate budget—often dramatically—to invest in the next big thing. They will create the budget you need, and with a little luck, they won’t wait to do so.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube
GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Founder CEO; Oracle - ex Head of Business Development; Author Amazon Bestseller List Book
4 年Thought Leadership Marketing: What you *can* gain in future by doing things differently from present / what you *may* lose in future by not doing things differently from?present.? Insight Marketing: What you *are* losing today by doing things in the present way. I read somewhere (Gartner / CEB?) that Thought Leadership Marketing, while not easy, is proving less and less effective of late. And that Insight Marketing, while hard, is proving more and more effective lately. Thoughts?
Fintech | Payments | Pragmatic Product Marketing
5 年Thought leadership is a quality tool to build urgency for pervasive problems, the challenge is breaking through the clutter of content in the current environment.?
Digital Anthropologist | CMO | I'm in WIRED, Forbes, National Geographic
5 年Bang on. Too often I see technology companies seeking to differentiate, yet falling into the sea of sameness to be like competitors. It's an odd way to differentiate oneself. Many tech startups are often afraid to change the rules too much. Perhaps for fear of being seen as too far ahead?
Marketing Advisor ? Author of Disruptive Marketing ? Former Microsoft Dell Ogilvy Dentsu executive
5 年Agree. This is how early adopters been able to sell concepts like AR, machine learning in voice skills and other on the edge concepts.