The technology adoption lifecycle has five distinct buyer types

Moore borrows and adapts a bell-curve model of adoption, dividing buyers into five groups: technology enthusiasts who buy novelty for its own sake, visionaries who buy disruptive potential to gain competitive advantage, the pragmatists who make up the bulk of any market and buy only what's proven and reliable, conservatives who buy reluctantly once a technology is thoroughly mainstream, and skeptics who may never buy at all.

The crucial insight is that these groups don't just differ in enthusiasm — they buy for fundamentally different reasons and respond to fundamentally different sales messages. A pitch built around "be the first" excites visionaries and repels pragmatists, who specifically don't want to be first; they want evidence that others like them have already succeeded with the product.

Moore's point is that most marketing strategies implicitly assume one buyer type represents the whole market, which works fine early on and then fails catastrophically once the market composition shifts toward pragmatists.

Takeaway: identify which buyer type you're actually selling to right now, because the pitch that wins one type will actively repel the next.