There’s a reason so many operators still come back to Geoffrey Moore decades after first encountering his work.
While much of academic marketing theory struggles to keep pace with reality, Moore has always had a knack for distilling what actually happens in markets – especially in fast-moving tech ecosystems – into ideas you can use.
One definition, in particular, has been resurfacing in our recent technology category design discussions: a market is a self-referencing group of customers.
At first glance, that sounds neat but abstract. It isn’t.
It’s brutally practical – and quietly disqualifies a huge number of so-called markets.
The uncomfortable implication
If customers don’t talk to each other, they’re not in the same market.
That’s not just philosophical. It has direct consequences: if your “target segment” isn’t internally connected, your chances of building Category Leadership collapse.
No conversation means no momentum, no reinforcement, no herd behaviour – and no scalable growth engine.
What actually makes a market?
A real market has a few defining characteristics:
- A clearly defined group of customers with shared needs
- A common use case – they’re buying for similar reasons
- And most importantly: self-referencing behaviour
That last point is the linchpin. Customers in a true market don’t decide in isolation – they influence each other. They swap notes, validate choices, and reduce perceived risk collectively.
This is where word-of-mouth stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the mechanism that drives adoption.
Why word-of-mouth matters
As technologies move from early adopters to the early majority, uncertainty increases. Buyers become more risk sensitive. They look sideways – to peers – for reassurance.
This is the core dynamic behind Moore’s breakthrough book – Crossing the Chasm: adoption accelerates not because marketing gets louder, but because the market starts talking to itself.
You can’t scale by speaking to every buyer individually. But you can scale if buyers speak to each other.
Without that internal communication loop, your message doesn’t propagate. There is no leverage.
The segmentation trap
Consider a familiar example: defining an ideal customer profile (ICP) as tech companies with $100M-$1B in revenue.
On paper, it looks clean. Firmographics align – industry, size, revenue band. A CRM will happily group them together.
But are they actually in the same market?
Take a French company and an American company in that segment. Same “bucket,” same category label.
In reality, they most likely:
- Operate in different networks
- Speak different languages
- Follow different influencers
- Attend different events
- Navigate different regulatory and cultural environments
Most importantly – they don’t talk to each other.
Which means they don’t reinforce each other’s decisions. There’s no shared narrative forming, no herd movement, no compounding adoption.
They’re not one market. They’re two disconnected ones.
Why this matters for crossing the chasm
Moore’s central thesis is that you don’t win by going broad – you win by going deep.
You dominate a small, tightly connected niche – a beachhead market – where:
- Customers interact frequently
- Word-of-mouth spreads rapidly
- Consensus forms quickly
In that environment, you can become the de facto standard – the Category Leader.
But if your evolving market is fragmented, you never get that effect. You stay stuck in a perpetual early-adopter phase, with no bridge to the mainstream.
The “whole product” effect
Self-referencing technology markets don’t just converge on what to buy – they converge on how to use it.
Over time, they align around:
- Integrations
- Best practices
- Service expectations
- Supporting tools
This is the “whole product” concept: the complete solution required to satisfy mainstream buyers.
If your audience isn’t connected, that convergence never happens. You’re left solving expensive bespoke problems for isolated customers instead of building a scalable offering.
Getting more from Moore: practical signals of a real market
Moore’s definition is powerful, but you can make it even more actionable by asking a few diagnostic questions about your potential customers:
Do they follow the same voices?
Even if customers don’t interact directly, shared influencers, analysts, or thought leaders can create indirect alignment.
Do they gather in the same places?
Conferences, forums, Slack groups, industry bodies – these are the infrastructure of connection. If there’s nowhere for interaction to happen, it probably won’t.
Is there realistic proximity?
Geography still matters. Local density increases the likelihood of informal interaction – events, meetups, even chance conversations. Think Silicon Valley.
Do conversations actually happen?
This is the ultimate test. Not theoretical overlap, but real exchange – recommendations, warnings, comparisons.
Because word-of-mouth doesn’t exist unless people talk.
Why this matters more now
As go-to-market strategies shift away from pure paid acquisition toward brand, community, and, ultimately, category creation, internal market dynamics matter more than ever.
You’re no longer just broadcasting messages – you’re trying to spark and sustain conversations.
If those conversations don’t exist – or can’t exist – you’re building on sand.
A simple sanity check
When defining your market or ICP, ask two linked questions:
Do these customers actually talk to each other? And how do they do it ?
If you can’t answer that clearly, you probably don’t have a market.
You have a spreadsheet.
And spreadsheets don’t create Category Leaders – conversations do.