Whos Crossing First?
The ideal strategy for crossing chasms is to gain critical mass in a particular vertical, and then market to adjacent markets that share similar pains, gradually reaching the tipping point where everybody jumps on board. Geoffrey Moore refers to this as the Bowling Alley strategy, hitting the head pin and knocking down the adjacent ones. Search is well down this road (or alley). Over the last few years, search has gained this critical mass in the verticals that tend to be proficient in direct response marketing. Categories like travel are heavy users of search, and we’re starting to see this extend into areas such as consumer electronics, software and other B2C consumer categories. Hard on the heels of these head pin categories are financial services and automotive. These verticals will be the first to jump. It will take longer for search to gain critical mass in the B2B sectors, but the early adopters in these verticals are already laying the foundations. The last to cross will be the
