Did you know you’re selling to a different type of buyer than you were five years ago? That was Gary Kayye’s message during “The Future of AV in Everything,” a presentation he delivered to roughly 75 attendees to his event. Gary’s main premise confronts experienced system integrators with the fact that as AV broadens, the customer base is different and needs to be addressed differently. Drawing from the book Crossing the Chasm, Gary showed how Geoffrey Moore’s analysis applies to the average AV system integrator who now faces an Early Majority buyer instead of an Early Minority customer. They have different questions; different pricing tolerances; and it’s a much bigger, broader customer base. 

Combine the chasm-jumping with I.T. and you can follow Gary’s logic to the impact of consumer technologies (iPOD, TiVO etc). A world where AV content is centrally located and pushed or pulled over a network. Home, office or away, the digital content is ubiquitously available.

Gary also spent time visiting manufacturers who were interested in help to expand into the American market.

On the humorous side, Gary Kayye flew in from USA to entertain an ISE crowd and ran into one problem:  the AV didn’t work. There we were, in the middle of Europe’s largest AV exhibition, and the projector did not work.

Someone plugged a cable into the wrong port and no one could get at the elevated projector without driving a high-rising “cherry-picker” over ISE attendees.

Gary sat patiently while Plan B brought a makeshift system into place, then the presentation commenced.