Crossing the chasm

Let me tell you that I am very new to the domain of "Interactive Marketing". Why, its been only 2 months since I started thinking about it, and one of the things that has always amazed me is the extent to which we can innovate in this domain.

"Money is the most powerful thing that exists in our world" - Is it the fact that there is a lot of money in interactive marketing domain that motivates the best management grads to put their heads together and figure out innovative ways to reach their target audience ? Not really - afterall its interactive marketing, not investment banking at wall street.

Then what is it that motivates an interactive marketer to innovate ? Well, a glance into the history of marketing would tell you that psychology has always played a significant role in the success or failure of a marketer and interactive marketing is no different. Everyday, an interactive marketer faces the challenge of understanding the human psychology, that too of people whom he hasn't met ( or even seen ). It is important to consider here that while the psychology of an individual is not important here, the psychology of the masses holds the key and an attempt to understand the secrets that lie beneath is as interesting as a Jungle Safari in Africa.

An interactive marketer constantly thinks of ways and means to get into the depth of mass psychology ( that the results are stored as statistical data is irrelevant to this discussion ) and to utilize that information to make informed decisions on marketing campaigns. What this really means is that an interactive marketer needs to innovate, to find ways to accumulate the information that gives him/her an understanding of mass psychology, to find ways to process this information to get new insights into mass psychology and to use these insights to find ways to influence the target audience better.

Now that sounds really exciting. But wait a minute - if there is really so much innovation happening in the interactive marketing domain, why is the change in the marketplace so gradual ? Why did it take so many years of struggle for interactive marketing to build a niche for itself in this big bad world ? Why isn't interactive marketing taking the biggest pie of the marketing spend of fortune 500 companies ?

The answer to these ( and other similar ) questions lie in the fact that the time lag between the time an innovation happens and the time it becomes mainstream is very large. If you have read "Crossing the Chasm" by "Geoffrey Moore", you might be familiar with the representation of this gap as a chasm, that every innovation has to cross before it goes mainstream. Unfortunately, every innovation has to face this acid test of survival and interactive marketing innovations are no different. If only this chasm could shrink....