Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
2005/12/15, Santiago Roza [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On 12/14/05, Thilo Pfennig [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So GNOME is Ubuntu and/or Fedora Core. no, it's a desktop environment, which currently exists by default in ubuntu and fedora core (amongst other minor distros). Well, don't you think that if people like me, that know much of GNOME, get confused, people not knowing GNOME yet get even more confused. Confused people don't switch! So we should push these brands? We have to if we want success by the way of distros. not directly, but it wouldn't be bad if we pushed the desktop linux brand, alongside with many other parties (kde, ubuntu, etc). We are doing the work for others and they do get the profit? I think Mozilla Foundation is having a better strategy. Dont just say it is easier for them we are a product, but more in the line of intel (like someone said) than the line of firefox. GNOME inside? :-) Thilo -- http://www.pfennigsolutions.de -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
El sáb, 17-12-2005 a las 13:14 +0100, Thilo Pfennig escribió: GNOME inside? :-) hell yeah!... maybe with other words but we could ask distros that use gnome as their main de (ubuntu, fedora, novell enterprise desktop) to put a powered by gnome-or-something-like-that label on their websites and cd cases. and linked to an url (in a cd case the url would be printed vertically on the side of the badge, in a website it would be a link) that was all like when you click on the aplications menu you're using GNOME, when you take a look at what time it is it's GNOME the one that's telling to you. we are proud to welcome you to the GNOME desktop. my two cents. Phrodo_00 phrodo00.byethost11.com/blog -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
hi, Am Mittwoch, den 14.12.2005, 21:41 -0300 schrieb Santiago Roza: On 12/14/05, Thilo Pfennig [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If we do not want that, why do we considering working with a GNOME brand? because the fact that we're not an end user final product doesn't mean we're not a product at all, or a brand. So, what are we really discussing here? Marketing a non-existing product? Sounds strange to me! :-) i repeat: the fact that we're not an end user final product doesn't mean we're not a product at all. i second that. there are other markets around then just business to customer (B2C). there's also a business to business market (B2B) - or do all the companies suddenly build their production plants entirely on their own instead of buying them? ;-) of course we should also try to establish pull marketing, so the customer himself asks the distributor for the product (=gnome) and not the other way round. my two cents. cheers, andre -- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | failed! http://www.iomc.de signature.asc Description: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 11:31 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote: I would prefer to just link to LiveCDs for the distributions, but 1) They don't provide these at the right time. 2) They don't all provide them. 3) They are not all a good user experience. Didn't Luis start an ubuntu-offshoot pure GNOME live CD? What happened to that? Er, that's what we are talking about. We had it for 2.10 and 2.12, and we'll have it again for 2.14. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 13:04:46 + Alex Hudson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [snip] Also, I know people have banged on about gnome.org a few times, but hiding the LiveCD in the download area is a shame. We should have some kind of 'Take a test drive' pretty prominently on the front page, if we think potential new users are coming to the site in substantial numbers. No real problem. Just make a splash screen that links to torrent.gnome.org Btw, this is not a shame but necessesary. There's just one front page but lots of good stuff to promote. :-) Cheers, Claus -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 16:36 -0300, Santiago Roza wrote: You are absolutely right. That's what i am always saying. We need GNOME out there. Either we should make out own distribution or ... for the love of god, no :) creating and maintaining and supporting a distro is an enourmous task, and we don't have the resources for that (nor we want to use them in something that isn't our job). However, there is much opportunity to get involved with the marketing of real distros, for people who feel the need to do that, and that's generally a win for us too. For instance, Ubuntu: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DIYMarketing Or Fedora (though it's not intended as a stable distro for non-techy use). -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 11:37 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: We have lots of data. Every GNOME release, we get data. So far, we've simply had no way to analyse, synthesis and transmit that data to the people who need to get it. Oooh! Oooh! Pick me! Pick me! Can you be more specific please Dave? What kind of data? Is it browsable somewhere? Who is in charge of gathering it? etc... This is the most important job the marketing community must do Hallelujah, brother! -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, John Williams wrote: On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 11:37 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: We have lots of data. Every GNOME release, we get data. So far, we've simply had no way to analyse, synthesis and transmit that data to the people who need to get it. Can you be more specific please Dave? What kind of data? Is it browsable somewhere? Who is in charge of gathering it? etc... I was thinking reviews, news articles, blog entries, bugzilla, IRC, LUG colleagues... Santiago did a synthesis of slashdot comments and negative reviews, I assembled a list of articles on the release, I guess technorati would be a good place to start for post-release blog entries. Like I said, the problem is gathering, synthesising and transmitting it :) Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lyon, France -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Perhaps we are getting too obsessed about this idea that people need to test something before getting it. well, people like to test things that could f*ck up their computers beyond all recognition... and wether we like it or not, that's what could happen when you install a new operating system. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
quote who=Santiago Roza i think we're pretty much obsessed with the real gnome, but we need to accept that the real gnome is the one real people receive with real distros... In large part, we do, as we're very pragmatic about our relationship with distributions and other major projects. They are a crucial part of the recipe, and we've always considered them that way. Certainly, we need to establish a stronger brand and image, but we're not going to do that by throwing away what we've achieved with these relationships so far! :-) - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2006: Dunedin, New Zealand http://linux.conf.au/ And, most importantly, we now have modules named 'fontilus' and 'themus' -- the two founders of GROME. - Jonathon Blandford -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Sat, 2005-12-10 at 11:58 +, Tom Chance wrote: On Friday 09 December 2005 22:12, Gezim Hoxha wrote: I agree that the next step would be to install Linux, however when they are greeted by a different desktop, be it KDE or whatever, they're going to want to know what happened to the nice looking lovely desktop (gnome) and they'll ask their local LUG or someone who supplied the distro for help. How many people will have this reaction? Where's your evidence? What makes any of you think that your personal experiences are a good guide to understanding GNOME's target markets? This was a pure opinion piece and I have no proof whatsoever. As far as what makes me think that my personal experiences are a good guide to understanding GNOME's target markets, nothing. I guess I made two assumptions: 1.) that people like myself would be one of GNOME's target markets 2.) and I assumed people are like me (doesn't everybody?). In my limited experience with friends and family, they've really not been too bothered whether it was GNOME or KDE. I've had people try the Ubuntu LiveCD and be perfectly happy when they got SuSE installed, and likewise happy when they saw Kubuntu on my machine then got Ubuntu installed (pre-Kubuntu ;-). Assuming the GNOME in the above distros was a version where the Applications menu was at the top, your finding is a surprising one. Didn't people notice that the applications menu (in KDE) is all of a sudden at the bottom? Didn't they see the difference? What proportion of GNOME's target markets who receive a LiveCD will know what a LUG is, where to find one and who will actually go and ask them (and get a good answer to) the question: How do I replace this with GNOME? How would you find the answer to this question? You make a good point. Again, I was assuming people are like me, which isn't always the case (Surprise, surprise :). Aside: this reminds me of Family Guy when Peter notices he's fat. But, I guess, we shouldn't waste time discussing this, rather we should design some sort of surveys and get our target markets to fill--first though, we got to figure out who our target markets is and make it official on a web site or wiki or whatver. I find KDE more usable than GNOME. I guess the response to that is, we don't care. Once we figure out that you and I and Bill Roberts is in our target markets _then_ we'll want to know about his likes and dislikes. Without some prior analysis of GNOME's target markets it makes no sense to talk about people who will ask their LUG or supplier; it makes no sense to even talk about people wanting the nice looking lovely desktop instead of whatever they get in the end, because you have no evidence to suggest that (a) that's why they liked GNOME and (b) they won't think the desktop they got wasn't also a nice looking lovely desktop. Well said. I completely agree. Regards, -Gezim -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: How interested in promoting GTK apps? [was Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?]
On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 22:43 +0100, Quim Gil wrote: We are saying that GNOME is not a product downloadable by itself but something that can be just tasted and tested through a disto and that the strong label in Desktop Linux. I think actually we're talking about what value 'GNOME' might have as a brand, and what that brand should represent. Apart from this, if Abiword is part of the GNOME project I don't see why the GNOME marketing team should discard the possibility of promoting it also in its MS Windows, if this is one of the best products we have. I don't think it should either - for one thing, if Abi gets great OpenDocument support, that puts it in a position where people could offer it as a file viewer/reader option when publishing OD format documents for people who are unable to access them - OOo is never going to fulfil this task. I would see the role of GNOME apps elsewhere much like the OS X apps that have w32 ports - iTunes, while running on Windows, is clearly not a Windows application, and I think PC users with iPods are being turned onto OSX through such applications (well, a friend of mine is doing exactly that right now: I suspect it's common, but I don't know how common). I don't think there is anything wrong with giving people w32 versions of Free Software, but telling them that they are GNOME apps (for example). I think there probably is a strong 'gateway drug' effect, and if people begin to want GNOME apps, they will begin to demand the best environment to run those apps (GNOME itself). And to that end, I think being able to refer to GIMP/Abi/etc. as GNOME apps rather than GTK+ apps would be a bonus - I think it's a lot easier to explain to users why they would be interested in GNOME than GTK+ for a start ;o) Cheers, Alex. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 12:10 -0500, Dan Winship wrote: Murray Cumming wrote: Gnome is not like Firefox. End users can see an ad for Firefox, decide that it's cool, download it, install it, and go. But end users can't download and install Gnome. The closest they can come is to download and install a Linux distribution that is *based on* Gnome, They can at least _try_ it easily, with a Live CD. Yes and no. I agree that running the Gnome Live CD will give them the feel of Gnome, but technically, what they're trying is Ubuntu (plus some hacks), not Gnome. It's GNOME plus what GNOME needs to run. We do reverse major Ubuntu changes such as browse-mode-as-default and Firefox-instead-of-epiphany, and the theme, so it's a pretty pure GNOME experience. GNOME without a kernel is not meaningful to people. And if they decide they like Gnome, then their next step is still to install Linux, not to install Gnome. (And I'm guessing there will eventually be politics around the fact that the Live CDs are based on Ubuntu as opposed to [insert everything else here].) As soon as the others have working/easy LiveCDs then I guess we'll present them too. Fedora, for instance, know that they are having difficulties creating one. I doubt that anyone would blame us for this. [snip] Differentiating yourself as a Linux distro is hard enough without explicitly acknowledging the fact that 95% of your software is the same as your competitors. :-) Create a brand that they might want to use is key though. The distros aren't going to change their messages to include our brand just because we want them to. We'd need to have a brand that reinforced the stories that the distros were already telling. Firefox has obvious overlap with any free software, but I think they use Firefox just because it's popular. Recently I've (amateurly, probably wrongly) concluded that we need to create a simple positive brand association, not convince people of little details such as this program is better than this program, or that GNOME starts here and stops there. It's why we hate the Intel/Coke/Cigarettes marketing, but it's probably why the Intel marketing is successful. Yeah, but do you want people in a few years to be saying It's why we hate the Intel/Coke/Cigarettes/GNOME marketing, but ...? That'd be good. -- Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Friday 09 December 2005 22:12, Gezim Hoxha wrote: On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 12:10 -0500, Dan Winship wrote: snip Yes and no. I agree that running the Gnome Live CD will give them the feel of Gnome, but technically, what they're trying is Ubuntu (plus some hacks), not Gnome. And if they decide they like Gnome, then their next step is still to install Linux, not to install Gnome. I agree that the next step would be to install Linux, however when they are greeted by a different desktop, be it KDE or whatever, they're going to want to know what happened to the nice looking lovely desktop (gnome) and they'll ask their local LUG or someone who supplied the distro for help. How many people will have this reaction? Where's your evidence? What makes any of you think that your personal experiences are a good guide to understanding GNOME's target markets? In my limited experience with friends and family, they've really not been too bothered whether it was GNOME or KDE. I've had people try the Ubuntu LiveCD and be perfectly happy when they got SuSE installed, and likewise happy when they saw Kubuntu on my machine then got Ubuntu installed (pre-Kubuntu ;-). Most of my friends are philosophers or activists and show no interest whatsoever in the software I use, except for when I talk about the freedom part because it's novel. Does my limited experience really count for anything? What proportion of GNOME's target markets who receive a LiveCD will know what a LUG is, where to find one and who will actually go and ask them (and get a good answer to) the question: How do I replace this with GNOME? How would you find the answer to this question? My girlfriend immediately started changing the look of KDE because she found it boring, but found GNOME even more so. In KDE I use the Lila icon theme (originally made for GNOME) and my panels are arranged in a similar way to the GNOME default, but I find the GNOME icons ugly as hell. What does that say about the discussions of beauty as a substantial marketing frame? I find KDE more usable than GNOME. Am I wrong, do I need to check into a clinic? (Don't answer that one ;-) What makes you think that the majority of your target market will disagree with me there? Without some prior analysis of GNOME's target markets it makes no sense to talk about people who will ask their LUG or supplier; it makes no sense to even talk about people wanting the nice looking lovely desktop instead of whatever they get in the end, because you have no evidence to suggest that (a) that's why they liked GNOME and (b) they won't think the desktop they got wasn't also a nice looking lovely desktop. You're all going to tie yourselves in knots with this my granny says / I like GNOME because discussion. Put some weight behind the suggestions of Santiago Roza, Marcus Bauer, Alex Hudson, Thilo Pfennig co who want analysis before discussing slogans, LiveCDs, etc. Don't stop promoting GNOME, but at least admit that any diagnosis behind slogans will be flawed until you do that hard background work. /lurk-cloak back on Regards, Tom -- I'm aware that e-mails to me may be blocked by my host because they are mistaken as spam. If this happens, please e-mail me at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, to Santiago Roza: I absolutely subscribe what you write. Actually I was writing a similar criticism.. about market segmentation.odt: I do not think that the approach is the right one, that is taken in there. This is a very product orientated model. And I think that is should nit be the point to persuade people to use GNOME. He cited a passage of John Williams and I think that was a good citation/point. I think we CAN choose what kind of users we target. What we choose now can be different in one or two years. I think we should know why we target what audience! And thinking that a target group is good is not enough. There should be more hard facts. I do not aggree on not targeting the mainstream desktop is a good idea! Dave NEary wrote: Because the mainstream will adopt Linux, not GNOME, and GNOME will just come along for the ride (see: Distributions and third party developers). And the mainstream isn't yet adopting linux on the desktop, so focussing energy there is a waste of our time. I don't think that this must be the case. GNOME clearly has to develop in other areas like ASP applications. We should not just follow the path of WIndows and say that we can not follow. I am absolutely convinced that a GNOME desktop can be competitive in the mainstream market. My impression is that GNOME really does not want to be loved. There is too much scepticism: On the one hand there are the hackers that know why they use GNOME, also the early adopters. And they do often communicate badly to the mainstream. If you look at the Ubuntu marketing you can learn that they just claim to be more human than other distros and gain a great new market share with it. This was ingenious! I also think that there is too less thought about how people actually will install there GNOME. I think that buy your distro, stupid is not a very good approach. Convincing ISVs is a nice idea and it will also pay off. What I would suggest is that there is also a way for a single user or a small company to test GNOME and also to install it very easy. Rigth now this is against our policy and I think this is wrong. I have the feeling we really want GNOME to be mainly for hackers and early adopters in the future. Linspire showed with Wal-Mart that Linux does not have to be in a niche market. People have some needs that they want to have solved. And GNOME can contribute, although I also think we have some more lessons to learn and our products have to be much better. Some products are very good and we should show them more prominent. Besides the applications we shuld show how GNOME is solving every day problems (by this I did not say anything about the target market) Thilo -- http://www.pfennigsolutions.de/ -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
[snip] Sorry for the long reply. Feel free to ignore - we seem to be in agreement. Gnome is not like Firefox. End users can see an ad for Firefox, decide that it's cool, download it, install it, and go. But end users can't download and install Gnome. The closest they can come is to download and install a Linux distribution that is *based on* Gnome, They can at least _try_ it easily, with a Live CD. A large amount of anecdotal evidence suggests that this has been an incredibly successful route to Linux/GNOME adoption for new Ubuntu users. VMPlayer images could be even better. which (even ignoring the huge difference in scale between a web browser and a distro) is a totally different thing. How would we tell users to install GNOME if we had a New York Times ad? Would we pick a preferred distro? Or let anyone who wanted to contribute money to the ad be able to put in a plug for their distro (even if that distro was really hard to install and was likely to end up driving users away)? We can't sell ourselves directly to end users. We need to sell ourselves to Linux distros, and get them to sell *themselves* to end users. We're not like Firefox, we're like Intel! [Cue Intel Inside chimes] I think we mention Firefox not because we are the same kind of product, but because we'd like our team to have their energy and effectiveness. Our marketing strategy would most likely be quite different. At the same time, there is indeed much talk of Intel's brand as something to imitate - to create awareness in users's minds so that the middlemen (PC manufacturers, distros, etc) must offer that brand as part of their products. Hopefully that creates some common brand across the products, positive brand assocications, and more sales for all. I'm not confident that we can make this work (though I want to try), because distros are currently removing almost all mention of the GNOME project from their GNOME-based products, apart from the About dialogs here and there. But we haven't really started to create a brand that they might want to use. Maybe it's not too late. The vast majority of our customers don't buy our product directly, they're getting it as an integral part of someone else's product. Even if they do understand that this other product contains our product, they aren't going to be able to explain exactly what our part does for the combined product, where our part of the product ends and the other vendor's part begins, or how the possible alternatives to our product would make things different for them. At best, they'll be able to say well, this one has 2.8 and that other one has 2.6, so I'll get this one because it has a bigger number! Maybe marketing professionals understand why, but Intel seems to successfully market their brand in connection with multimedia, communication, creativity, etc, though that blurs distinctions. I don't think users care. They want a good computer and don't care about the technical details. As long as GNOME means positive brand association to be chosen then they'll be happy to have a GNOME computer. It's up to the distros to distinguish themselves, just as they already do despite the fact that they all have Linux (a strong brand without clear boundaries). Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean we want to market ourselves the same way Intel does. Intel definitely markets itself to end users, but that's just part of its strategy to sell chips to PC manufacturers, who are its real customers. By convincing end users that PCs with Intel chips are better/faster/more-likely-to-get-them-laid than PCs with AMD chips, they keep the demand for Intel-based PCs high, which keeps the manufacturers buying lots of chips, which keeps Intel in business. We could apply the same technique: convince end users that GNOME is better for them, so that they will preferentially install distros that use GNOME, so that distros (our real customers) will use GNOME as their preferred desktop. But there's a problem. (Sri, you might want to stop reading here :-). Intel only markets itself to end users because its products *aren't* any better than its competitors'. If their chips were unambiguously better than AMDs, then the PC manufacturers wouldn't need to be convinced to stay with Intel, it would just be the obvious choice. The same principle should hold for GNOME. If we are actually better than our competitors, than all we have to do is make sure that the distros realize this (by marketing ourselves *to the distros*), and we win. And if we *aren't* better than our competitors, then we're working against users' interests if we try to convince them otherwise. Having a good product is obviously a huge part of marketing that product, but isn't the market littered with good products that failed because they weren't marketed correctly? I don't think we have a lot to lose by doing more. (And what are we going to convince end users of anyway? Recently I've
Re: How interested in promoting GTK apps? [was Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?]
- How interested is the GNOME project promoting Epiphany and the GNOME Office tools over Firefox and OpenOffice.org (we could add here Evolution vs Thunderbird). I don't think there's much to gain from promoting Epiphany. I think we've lost that struggle with the distros, because the Firefox brand is so strong. Luckily, Firefox loves GNOME and is far better than Mozilla was when Epiphany started. Abiword appears to be a better Word processor, and maybe be a good way to show the GNOME easyness/friendliness. Surprisingly (to me) Apple has had some success with their new usable word process (Pages), though it's not like MS-Word. I suspect that a relaunched Abiword could have a Firefox effect because people hate MS-Word so much. If it happened, it could be an ambassador for the GNOME brand. But the problem is that there's a huge demand for OpenOffice as an MS Office equivalent, and we benefit greatly from that demand being satisfied, and we don't want to undermine that. - I think I have read from Murray, Dom and others that tools like Epiphany and Abiword are somehow better, but... what are the arguments to afirm this and do we want to promote them? - In general, how strong and valid is the whole GTK thing to be marketed as something distinctive, genuine and worth to test and enjoy? I see no need to have separate GTK+ and GNOME brands. Let them be GNOME applications. [snip] Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
[snip] A very important factor are the small linux support companies that install/migrate/admin linux servers/desktops for small to middle companies. That's an excellent point. They are a small enough group of decision makers that we should be talking to them directly. I'd love to have a list of these companies on the wiki. [snip] Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 09:46 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote: They can at least _try_ it easily, with a Live CD. A large amount of anecdotal evidence suggests that this has been an incredibly successful route to Linux/GNOME adoption for new Ubuntu users. VMPlayer images could be even better. I'm going to pimp http://www.colinux.org/ even though I've never used it and don't have w32. It looks to my naive eyes that it could be as simple as adding another kernel and a bit of runtime to a live CD. Recently I've (amateurly, probably wrongly) concluded that we need to create a simple positive brand association, not convince people of little details such as this program is better than this program, or that GNOME starts here and stops there. It's why we hate the Intel/Coke/Cigarettes marketing, but it's probably why the Intel marketing is successful. I think you're probably right. I would think, though, that the apps are still the most important component, so the way the brand would need to work would be that people would recognise an app as being a GNOME app, and associate that with the benefits of GNOME (e.g., simplicity, integration with nautilus, or whatever). So, when people see a new GNOME app, they want to try it out. And they ask for a GNOME environment so they can get access to their favourite apps. I know this runs contrary to the thinking on usability (that user data should be the first class object, not the app), but I can't see another way the brand could work? Anyway, for the brand to work that way (i.e., GNOME implies good app), we need some examples of the inverse (X good app is a GNOME app) in order to build that association. How you make clear the latter link I don't know; the GNOME stuff is filed off on many distros (e.g., you get a RedHat/Ubuntu menu rather than a foot menu...) At some point, we might want to stop being so deferential, and accept that we are winning. We are the only viable Linux Desktop, simply because of usability. I know that's not a politically wise position for us as an organisation, but it's my opinion. If you're saying marketing shouldn't be deferential, I agree - I'm not sure where else being less deferential would benefit GNOME, though. Ideally, you want other people to tell you you're winning ;) Cheers, Alex. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: How interested in promoting GTK apps? [was Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?]
En/na Murray Cumming ha escrit: I see no need to have separate GTK+ and GNOME brands. Let them be GNOME applications. This is all I wanted to read. If it's clear we have 'GNOME applications' able to run on MS Windows, then we can shameless promote GNOME as (also) damn good free software you can easily download and try on MS Windows (as well). Combining this with the rest of the debate of the last week, now I turn my head back and I see GNOME is a Unix and Linux desktop suite and development platform far far behind. Maybe we can come up with an alternative to this short definition easy to change in the homepage in combination with an updated http://gnome.org/about/ page. We don't need weeks of research on personas to do this, don't we? Nor we need to revamp gnome.org in order to make these 2 changes happen. -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: How interested in promoting GTK apps? [was Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?]
On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 10:21 +0100, Quim Gil wrote: En/na Murray Cumming ha escrit: I see no need to have separate GTK+ and GNOME brands. Let them be GNOME applications. This is all I wanted to read. If it's clear we have 'GNOME applications' able to run on MS Windows, then we can shameless promote GNOME as (also) damn good free software you can easily download and try on MS Windows (as well). I agree fully with this, I would actually see this as a branding thing for developers also, tbh. There are lots of valid reasons for not wanting to link into GNOME - not wanting to depend on GNOME, not wanting the extra memory requirement, whatever. Maybe there should be a GNOME Basic Profile and GNOME Full Profile or something? I think it fits the kind of thing Project Ridley is basically doing, and would be easier to describe to people (e.g., 'the full profile is the basic API plus features X, Y and Z') - it works for other technology; Java is split up similarly. This would have huge benefits, too, if the basic profile were something you can run on embedded devices like maemo. So, you can run GNOME apps on w32, embedded, wherever, and the full cream desktop is positioned as a real step up. I don't know if this idea fits neatly with reality (in terms of the actual software), but it simplifies the various technical jargon in the GNOME world, and a more unified brand is pretty obviously going to be a stronger one. Cheers, Alex. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: How interested in promoting GTK apps? [was Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?]
i think we shouldn't be promoting gtk apps in order to boost the gnome brand, because: - real-life gnome desktops (like ubuntu or fedora core) default to openoffice.org, and sometimes they don't even INCLUDE gnome office (abiword, gnumeric, etc)... so in the dubious case we actually get people to try gnome (via ubuntu and/or fedora), they won't find those gnome apps there. in marketing, a fake promise is a serious brand-killer... and we don't want to kill our brand, do we? :) - even if they would find those apps in a real-life gnome desktop (and they won't), is that what's to push in our brand? are we an isolated word processor (or a spreadsheet) in a foreign environment, or an integrated solution? how much of that integrated solution will they see with abiword running on win32? imho, little to nothing... it would be good to have abiword (and gnumeric and gimp etc) relating themselves a bit more to gnome (brought to you by the gnome desktop, a proud component of the gnome desktop, or something like that)... the same way it would be good to have ubuntu or fedora relating to us a bit more. but we can't build much based on that. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
I'm going to pimp http://www.colinux.org/ even though I've never used it and don't have w32. It looks to my naive eyes that it could be as simple as adding another kernel and a bit of runtime to a live CD. i've tried colinux on win32, and believe me, it's FAR from just working. a real average user will dump it in 2 minutes, because after the default install you need to read documentation and configure stuff (especially networking) before you're able to play with it. if it just worked, it'd be a great tool to test-drive gnome. i wish i could contribute to that, but it seems like i lack some technical skills =( -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Gnome is not like Firefox. End users can see an ad for Firefox, decide that it's cool, download it, install it, and go. But end users can't download and install Gnome. i agree 100%; that's why i always say we have yet to agree on our target markets, and our marketing strategy. How would we tell users to install GNOME if we had a New York Times ad? Would we pick a preferred distro? We can't sell ourselves directly to end users. We need to sell ourselves to Linux distros, and get them to sell *themselves* to end users. we can't sell ourselves directly to NON-LINUX end users, because linux end users can just install gnome (so we can sell directly to them). if we want to sell ourselves to non-linux end users, we'd have to market it as linux desktop (not as gnome), working together with kde and the distros (but that would be a whole new different marketing operation). We're not like Firefox, we're like Intel! [Cue Intel Inside chimes] that would be great. i mean, having ubuntu and fedora post a little gnome inside (or powered by gnome) logo in their websites. do you guys think we could nag them about that (with the kind collaboration of our gnome celebrities)? ;) We could apply the same technique: convince end users that GNOME is better for them, so that they will preferentially install distros that use GNOME, so that distros (our real customers) will use GNOME as their preferred desktop. yes, if you mean linux end users. non-linux end users will not demand gnome, because they don't know what gnome is... and if they did, that knowledge wouldn't be so strong to cause a demand. it could be, but only if we had the millions to push our brand to that level :) Intel only markets itself to end users because its products *aren't* any better than its competitors'. If their chips were unambiguously better than AMDs, then the PC manufacturers wouldn't need to be convinced to stay with Intel, it would just be the obvious choice. that doesn't apply to us: there are objective ways to measure which processor is better, but a desktop's quality is something very very subjective. so we have much more things to do, other than just convincing anyone. (And what are we going to convince end users of anyway? ... GNOME isn't a whole story unto itself. Desktop Linux is the story, but that's not a story we can tell on our own.) and there's the key to our marketing strategy... we're not exactly a (non-linux) end user product, so if we market ourselves to (non-linux) end users, we should be very careful. imagine we convince a windows user to try gnome; can we actually deliver? we could with vmware player (but we still don't have images), we could with colinux (if it just worked), we could with live cds (if the distro detected all the hardware and could play a simple mp3). as we can see, we depend on many others to deliver to windows end-users, so we either fix those many problems ourselves (and/or working alongside with those other parties), or don't make end users a promise we can't keep (i repeat: in marketing a false promise is a brand killer). marketing ourselves to other audiences is a whole new issue, so maybe we don't want to discuss it here :) -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Murray Cumming wrote: Gnome is not like Firefox. End users can see an ad for Firefox, decide that it's cool, download it, install it, and go. But end users can't download and install Gnome. The closest they can come is to download and install a Linux distribution that is *based on* Gnome, They can at least _try_ it easily, with a Live CD. Yes and no. I agree that running the Gnome Live CD will give them the feel of Gnome, but technically, what they're trying is Ubuntu (plus some hacks), not Gnome. And if they decide they like Gnome, then their next step is still to install Linux, not to install Gnome. (And I'm guessing there will eventually be politics around the fact that the Live CDs are based on Ubuntu as opposed to [insert everything else here].) VMPlayer images could be even better. Without conceding my earlier point that this doesn't count as trying Gnome, I agree that this is a great idea. :-) I'm not confident that we can make this work (though I want to try), because distros are currently removing almost all mention of the GNOME project from their GNOME-based products, apart from the About dialogs here and there. But we haven't really started to create a brand that they might want to use. Maybe it's not too late. Differentiating yourself as a Linux distro is hard enough without explicitly acknowledging the fact that 95% of your software is the same as your competitors. :-) Create a brand that they might want to use is key though. The distros aren't going to change their messages to include our brand just because we want them to. We'd need to have a brand that reinforced the stories that the distros were already telling. Recently I've (amateurly, probably wrongly) concluded that we need to create a simple positive brand association, not convince people of little details such as this program is better than this program, or that GNOME starts here and stops there. It's why we hate the Intel/Coke/Cigarettes marketing, but it's probably why the Intel marketing is successful. Yeah, but do you want people in a few years to be saying It's why we hate the Intel/Coke/Cigarettes/GNOME marketing, but ...? -- Dan -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
You are absolutely right. That's what i am always saying. We need GNOME out there. Either we should make out own distribution or ... for the love of god, no :) creating and maintaining and supporting a distro is an enourmous task, and we don't have the resources for that (nor we want to use them in something that isn't our job). i even think we shouldn't have our own live cd... why encourage people to test-drive something they can't get? that qualifies as a false promise too, and we want to avoid those, don't we? if we encourage people to try something, we should drive them to real-life products (like ubuntu and fedora core), not synthetic creations that only exist in our minds. Yes and no. I agree that running the Gnome Live CD will give them the feel of Gnome, but technically, what they're trying is Ubuntu (plus some hacks), not Gnome. because ideal-abstract-gnome doesn't exist in real life, at least not as an end user product. and we should be ok with that; believing we're an end user product might trigger crazy ideas like creating and supporting our very own distro :) -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: How interested in promoting GTK apps? [was Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?]
En/na Santiago Roza ha escrit: i think we shouldn't be promoting gtk apps in order to boost the gnome brand, because: This time I don't agree. :) We are saying that GNOME is not a product downloadable by itself but something that can be just tasted and tested through a disto and that the strong label in Desktop Linux. Well, yes and no. Free software is also a strong label and, although many times mistaken, is a term recognisable by lots of users. As we know and as we have said recently in this list, free software on MS Windows is useful to get big amounts of users familiar with the 'free as in speech' softwar and philosophy. This is the path Mozilla has followed, now that we mention here and there how great the Mozilla marketing is. Offering Abiword as a great GNOME tool and stating it is free software you can download and test with your MS Window is a way to show how good free software can be, how free as in speech and how free as in bier, and we are putting them in the GNOME path, so if they want more they will find more around GNOME (Gaim etc) and if they want to go really free we will recommend them the list of distros GNOME likes. Apart from this, if Abiword is part of the GNOME project I don't see why the GNOME marketing team should discard the possibility of promoting it also in its MS Windows, if this is one of the best products we have. Apart from this, it is easier for us to agree branding policies with the GNOME tools running on MS Windows than with the distributions using GNOME but not being part of this project. Also, don't lose the perspective and think in the mid term. Either through Mono and Java more and more GTK and therefore GNOME applications will be working on several operative systems. Are we going to forget all this just to keep promoting only the hardcore 'linux desktop' concept we can't fully control, nor provide? Now a question: how did you get into free software and become 100% GNOME users? I'm a persona ;) that may be representative of a type of user that has thousends (millions) of representants out there: I was a MS Windows user, I knew there were free programs I could download and copy legally for free. I tried, I liked them, I searched for more... One year later or so I was considering seriously to move to GNU/Linux because in the meantime I understood that that was the first division and that a user like me could find a place there. The good free software tools running on MS Windows (Mozilla and OpenOffice.org, then others) were the gateway that lead me to a Linux Desktop. And these tools are what I recommend to any MS Windows user initially interested in free software, or simply an alternative to Microsoft. They are seed that will flourish their interest in the Real Essence of Free Software slowly and from inside, in a process that will take longer that loading a LiveCD but in a process in which a bigger percentage of user (IMO) end up becoming GNU/Linux desktop users. -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Fri, 2005-12-09 at 12:10 -0500, Dan Winship wrote: snip Yes and no. I agree that running the Gnome Live CD will give them the feel of Gnome, but technically, what they're trying is Ubuntu (plus some hacks), not Gnome. And if they decide they like Gnome, then their next step is still to install Linux, not to install Gnome. I agree that the next step would be to install Linux, however when they are greeted by a different desktop, be it KDE or whatever, they're going to want to know what happened to the nice looking lovely desktop (gnome) and they'll ask their local LUG or someone who supplied the distro for help. Regards, -Gezim -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Sri Ramkrishna wrote: I met the guy who did firefox's community (and release manager I believe)stuff (and I think marketing) at OSCON. He said he would be happy to talk with us about what he did to help Firefox. Gnome is not like Firefox. End users can see an ad for Firefox, decide that it's cool, download it, install it, and go. But end users can't download and install Gnome. The closest they can come is to download and install a Linux distribution that is *based on* Gnome, which (even ignoring the huge difference in scale between a web browser and a distro) is a totally different thing. How would we tell users to install GNOME if we had a New York Times ad? Would we pick a preferred distro? Or let anyone who wanted to contribute money to the ad be able to put in a plug for their distro (even if that distro was really hard to install and was likely to end up driving users away)? We can't sell ourselves directly to end users. We need to sell ourselves to Linux distros, and get them to sell *themselves* to end users. We're not like Firefox, we're like Intel! [Cue Intel Inside chimes] The vast majority of our customers don't buy our product directly, they're getting it as an integral part of someone else's product. Even if they do understand that this other product contains our product, they aren't going to be able to explain exactly what our part does for the combined product, where our part of the product ends and the other vendor's part begins, or how the possible alternatives to our product would make things different for them. At best, they'll be able to say well, this one has 2.8 and that other one has 2.6, so I'll get this one because it has a bigger number! Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean we want to market ourselves the same way Intel does. Intel definitely markets itself to end users, but that's just part of its strategy to sell chips to PC manufacturers, who are its real customers. By convincing end users that PCs with Intel chips are better/faster/more-likely-to-get-them-laid than PCs with AMD chips, they keep the demand for Intel-based PCs high, which keeps the manufacturers buying lots of chips, which keeps Intel in business. We could apply the same technique: convince end users that GNOME is better for them, so that they will preferentially install distros that use GNOME, so that distros (our real customers) will use GNOME as their preferred desktop. But there's a problem. (Sri, you might want to stop reading here :-). Intel only markets itself to end users because its products *aren't* any better than its competitors'. If their chips were unambiguously better than AMDs, then the PC manufacturers wouldn't need to be convinced to stay with Intel, it would just be the obvious choice. The same principle should hold for GNOME. If we are actually better than our competitors, than all we have to do is make sure that the distros realize this (by marketing ourselves *to the distros*), and we win. And if we *aren't* better than our competitors, then we're working against users' interests if we try to convince them otherwise. (And what are we going to convince end users of anyway? Use GNOME! It has Epiphany! [Unless you're using Red Hat, SUSE, or Ubuntu. Or anything else.] It doesn't have an office suite! GNOME isn't a whole story unto itself. Desktop Linux is the story, but that's not a story we can tell on our own.) -- Dan -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
How interested in promoting GTK apps? [was Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?]
Precisely today I was thinking about Epiphany and the GNOME Office suite. GTK is something specific to GNOME, and GTK can be the horse of Troja of GNOME in the MS Windows world as (Dave?) pointed recently: you can just download and try. But then we have OpenOffice.org and the Mozilla family as two of the most known and successful free software projects, and they also can be downloaded and tried in MS Windows. They are not part of the GNOME project, yet they are GNOME-friendly. En/na Dan Winship ha escrit: (And what are we going to convince end users of anyway? Use GNOME! It has Epiphany! [Unless you're using Red Hat, SUSE, or Ubuntu. Or anything else.] It doesn't have an office suite! My questions are: - How interested is the GNOME project promoting Epiphany and the GNOME Office tools over Firefox and OpenOffice.org (we could add here Evolution vs Thunderbird). - I think I have read from Murray, Dom and others that tools like Epiphany and Abiword are somehow better, but... what are the arguments to afirm this and do we want to promote them? - In general, how strong and valid is the whole GTK thing to be marketed as something distinctive, genuine and worth to test and enjoy? I am no programmer so I have no idea about 'the quality of the product', altough I kind of smell possibilities for being one original piece in our marketing puzzle. -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, I agree with many things you wrote in your post; I really do! This is why I have to nitpick a little bit: ;-) 1.) Intel markets itself to end users to be able to receive a premium for its products and/or sell more. 2.) Quality is seldomly a one-dimensional measure for buyers. To use words as 'obvious choice' and 'unambiguously better' is in most cases wrong. I believe your conclusions are thus not quite right: There's quite a lot we need to convince end users of. Cheers, Claus On Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:28:05 -0500 Dan Winship [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sri Ramkrishna wrote: I met the guy who did firefox's community (and release manager I believe)stuff (and I think marketing) at OSCON. He said he would be happy to talk with us about what he did to help Firefox. Gnome is not like Firefox. End users can see an ad for Firefox, decide that it's cool, download it, install it, and go. But end users can't download and install Gnome. The closest they can come is to download and install a Linux distribution that is *based on* Gnome, which (even ignoring the huge difference in scale between a web browser and a distro) is a totally different thing. How would we tell users to install GNOME if we had a New York Times ad? Would we pick a preferred distro? Or let anyone who wanted to contribute money to the ad be able to put in a plug for their distro (even if that distro was really hard to install and was likely to end up driving users away)? We can't sell ourselves directly to end users. We need to sell ourselves to Linux distros, and get them to sell *themselves* to end users. We're not like Firefox, we're like Intel! [Cue Intel Inside chimes] The vast majority of our customers don't buy our product directly, they're getting it as an integral part of someone else's product. Even if they do understand that this other product contains our product, they aren't going to be able to explain exactly what our part does for the combined product, where our part of the product ends and the other vendor's part begins, or how the possible alternatives to our product would make things different for them. At best, they'll be able to say well, this one has 2.8 and that other one has 2.6, so I'll get this one because it has a bigger number! Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean we want to market ourselves the same way Intel does. Intel definitely markets itself to end users, but that's just part of its strategy to sell chips to PC manufacturers, who are its real customers. By convincing end users that PCs with Intel chips are better/faster/more-likely-to-get-them-laid than PCs with AMD chips, they keep the demand for Intel-based PCs high, which keeps the manufacturers buying lots of chips, which keeps Intel in business. We could apply the same technique: convince end users that GNOME is better for them, so that they will preferentially install distros that use GNOME, so that distros (our real customers) will use GNOME as their preferred desktop. But there's a problem. (Sri, you might want to stop reading here :-). Intel only markets itself to end users because its products *aren't* any better than its competitors'. If their chips were unambiguously better than AMDs, then the PC manufacturers wouldn't need to be convinced to stay with Intel, it would just be the obvious choice. The same principle should hold for GNOME. If we are actually better than our competitors, than all we have to do is make sure that the distros realize this (by marketing ourselves *to the distros*), and we win. And if we *aren't* better than our competitors, then we're working against users' interests if we try to convince them otherwise. (And what are we going to convince end users of anyway? Use GNOME! It has Epiphany! [Unless you're using Red Hat, SUSE, or Ubuntu. Or anything else.] It doesn't have an office suite! GNOME isn't a whole story unto itself. Desktop Linux is the story, but that's not a story we can tell on our own.) -- Dan -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 16:28 -0500, Dan Winship wrote: Sri Ramkrishna wrote: I met the guy who did firefox's community (and release manager I believe)stuff (and I think marketing) at OSCON. He said he would be happy to talk with us about what he did to help Firefox. Gnome is not like Firefox. End users can see an ad for Firefox, decide that it's cool, download it, install it, and go. But end users can't download and install Gnome. The closest they can come is to download and install a Linux distribution that is *based on* Gnome, which (even ignoring the huge difference in scale between a web browser and a distro) is a totally different thing. How would we tell users to install GNOME if we had a New York Times ad? Would we pick a preferred distro? Or let anyone who wanted to contribute money to the ad be able to put in a plug for their distro (even if that distro was really hard to install and was likely to end up driving users away)? I think the liveCD fills quite a gap here. We can't sell ourselves directly to end users. We need to sell ourselves to Linux distros, and get them to sell *themselves* to end users. We're not like Firefox, we're like Intel! [Cue Intel Inside chimes] The vast majority of our customers don't buy our product directly, they're getting it as an integral part of someone else's product. Even if they do understand that this other product contains our product, they aren't going to be able to explain exactly what our part does for the combined product, where our part of the product ends and the other vendor's part begins, or how the possible alternatives to our product would make things different for them. At best, they'll be able to say well, this one has 2.8 and that other one has 2.6, so I'll get this one because it has a bigger number! Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean we want to market ourselves the same way Intel does. Intel definitely markets itself to end users, but that's just part of its strategy to sell chips to PC manufacturers, who are its real customers. By convincing end users that PCs with Intel chips are better/faster/more-likely-to-get-them-laid than PCs with AMD chips, they keep the demand for Intel-based PCs high, which keeps the manufacturers buying lots of chips, which keeps Intel in business. We could apply the same technique: convince end users that GNOME is better for them, so that they will preferentially install distros that use GNOME, so that distros (our real customers) will use GNOME as their preferred desktop. But there's a problem. (Sri, you might want to stop reading here :-). Intel only markets itself to end users because its products *aren't* any better than its competitors'. If their chips were unambiguously better than AMDs, then the PC manufacturers wouldn't need to be convinced to stay with Intel, it would just be the obvious choice. I think that your looking at two extremes here by only looking at distros and the end user. A very important factor are the small linux support companies that install/migrate/admin linux servers/desktops for small to middle companies. IMHO distros other then perhaps linspire or Xandros don't actually want to make a choice between KDE/GNOME they will simply give that choice to the users and tell the users that that choice is a good thing(tm) However the small linux company's can't do that kind of thing, they are getting payed money to make that choice for other people/companies. convincing those people that GNOME is the obvious beter/more functional choice would be a far greater win i think. but this all very very IMHO, since i first really need to pick up a book on marketing and give myself a crash course, because i'm thinking too much of selling and as said before somewhere on the list that's not what marketing is. -- Erik Snoeijs [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
quote who=Dan Winship The same principle should hold for GNOME. If we are actually better than our competitors, than all we have to do is make sure that the distros realize this (by marketing ourselves *to the distros*), and we win. And if we *aren't* better than our competitors, then we're working against users' interests if we try to convince them otherwise. Agree - just want to butt in to say developers are customers of GNOME too, and we should treat them equally as importantly as we have the distros. - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2006: Dunedin, New Zealand http://linux.conf.au/ It is said that there are only six jokes in the world, and I can assure you that we can only broadcast three of them... - John Watt, the BBC's Head of Variety in the 30's -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
I met the guy who did firefox's community (and release manager I believe)stuff (and I think marketing) at OSCON. He said he would be happy to talk with us about what he did to help Firefox. sri -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi Claus, Claus Schwarm wrote: * No 'exclusive' influence on developers or product decisions. Even the board is unable to do that. Ahem. The board *shouldn't* do that. Not the same thing. We are a sub-group of the GNOME project. If we have some suggestions for Nautilus, backed up with real user feedback, I am sure we will have more weight than any old Joe Bloggs. We haven't tested the theory yet, though. Activity on mailing lists and bugzilla is the best way to do that. And getting to know the developers involved :) there's not even a way to gain a reputation for making good product suggestions. Unlike wikipedia, GNOME favours credentials over consensus. Gaining a reputation for making good product suggestions will come from (guess what?) making good product suggestions. * There's no way to break to circle: No data - No target (market) - No data - We have lots of data. Every GNOME release, we get data. So far, we've simply had no way to analyse, synthesis and transmit that data to the people who need to get it. This is the most important job the marketing community must do - not talking to people outside GNOME about what's happening inside, but the other way around. Making sure the right people inside GNOME are getting feedback from people who aren't using Bugzilla. Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
En/na Dave Neary ha escrit: Activity on mailing lists and bugzilla is the best way to do that. And getting to know the developers involved :) Right, but mailings lists and bugzilla are not the best interface for newcomers. And non mailinglistsandbugzilla channels are not the best interface to deal with GNOME developers. We have a problem of interface and the marketing team is in between (and the webhackers too). Please note that marketing people are possibly even more reluctant to dive into mailing lists and bugzilla. And wikis. People like Santiago may hear from us through rss feeds and planets, and any other web based interface with a proper structure layout, and a reasonable usability. This means we have a structural problem here: in order to get the people that will help us to change/improve our structure and interface we need to change first our structure and interface. Santiago, if you didn't get any proper answer to your questions it was because all the factors exposed now plus a main factor of time and dedication of the marketing team members. Most of us are primarly involved in other parts of the project, we love this corner of GNOME but we spend time and energies when we have them. IMHO the main problems of the marketing team would be solved just by getting more people like you willing to collaborate. We have a problem of human resources as well. :) But... even if you crash here and want to help it's not easy to do so becauste there is a lack of main objectives and strategy. This is the same reason because it's not easy to collaborate even if you are a GNOME insider or even a marketing team regular contributor. Our current objectives and strategy have been mainly individual. Luis thinks this is important and he invests time on it. Dave thinks that is important and does the same. Jeff, Murray, Sri, Quim... add yourself to the list. But... where are the common objectives and strategy? What are the 5 main challenges to be achieved by the merketing team in 2006? We can't even have a version control system to show our progress (were we 6 months ago in 1.2? Are we in 1.3 already or just messing 1.2.4?) As a conclusion, we have a problem of interface, structure, human resources, objectives and strategy. Not bad. :) The good news is that we have a great product: GNOME. Many marketing teams are just in the opposite solution: as a team they are great and well organised but they need to sell crap. I much prefer our situation. If only we would have 2-3 team challenges to achieve, and making explicit they are our priority over the next months. A roadmap, the developers call it. -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Dave! Unlike wikipedia, GNOME favours credentials over consensus. Gaining a reputation for making good product suggestions will come from (guess what?) making good product suggestions. Sorry but that was not what I meant. ;-) Of course, a series of 'good' suggestions will gain you a reputation. But the people judgeing about good or bad are the same that made previous decisions. The result will be a perfect product for this particular peer-group. I'm sure there is at least one developer peer-group where every suggestion rules that improves configurability! (You-know-who) :-D In our peer-group, every suggestion reducing configurablity is judged good but is this really true from a marketing point of view? I don't think so. The key is being able to differentiate between good and bad suggestions. This needs a proper research method, and a clearly defined and agreed upon goal. We lack both. Cheers, Claus -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
I agree that we have a problem empowering people. People on the list seem to be waiting for direction (from you, me or Luis...). I think both John and Santiago are ideal candidates for developing and leading a strategy of merket analysis - getting information from our target markets, and figuring out how we can communicate with them on a wider scale. But getting information is the start - when their information retrieval contributes to technical decisions in a project, our marketing will begin to be more successful. Fine. But when that getting information is obviously stalled then it can't be allowed to stop us. And I think there is a misunderstanding about how much information we have, or an expectation that our information should be in the form of statistics and numbers. We do know what our users want, and we do know what they are like. That's why we've had a clear development consensus around usability and just works and enabling users to reach their goals. Compared to our free-software competition, we are already incredibly focused. I think we also overestimate the value of this targetting: - Ubuntu have very generic emotional marketing materials, yet I think we would like their kind of success. - Firefox also have a very wide market with a very generic product, and marketed successfuly to that wide market.. They didn't decide to target scientific users or educational users. (Yes, I know they had a slightly easier delivery method.) We have a bunch of critics of GNOME, and while sometimes they're wrong (!), it mightn't be any harm to somehow communicate their concerns with the appropriate people, and try to get some of those concerns addressed for 2.14. For example, Santiago's mail: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2005-September/msg00067.html There were criticisms in there of Nautilus, the menu editor, performance and usage of GNOME VFS (without specifics, it has to be said). Did those ever get sent back to the Nautilus developers? How about a proposal to include SMEG in 2.14? OK, but don't think it's going to help our marketing to have a discussion about whether spatial nautilus is good or not, as long as this mailing list remains as poorly informed about the user experience as the average slashdot commenter. Marketing comes in 5 stages - 1. action, 2. communication, 3. information retrieval, 4. reaction, 5. communication, 6. goto 3 How good is our feedback loop? What Santiago is saying, if I understand correctly, is that right now we don't seem to have one, and one would be nice. Yes. But a) what are the suggestions, and b) should we wait for one. If we don't plan to target these people differently, then there isn't much point in targetting them separately. We do, though. Example: Target: Windows hobbyists - Help get copies of WinLibre or the OpenCd on magazine covers - Hand out copies of same at conferences, alongside LiveCDs (there's a reason Ubuntu is putting windows software on their LiveCDs). - Make the Windows binaries easier to find download (look at www.gimp.org for an example of hard to find Windows binaries - comare contrast with getfirefox.org) - If a bunch of projects have Windows ports, how about centralising everything for downloads? Have static links, help people avoid the user nightmare that is Sourceforge downloads. Yes, this would be nice. Target: Distros - Email advisory board members regularly, just to keep in contact - Find out who the decision makers for distros are - Use the phone - Make sure feedback gets back to relevant developers I have personally failed at this utterly. It would be very nice. There are few enough distros that the correct way to market to them is to be available, and listen. Target: Third party developers - Improve API docs - Provide a third party application developers guide - Listen to Bugzilla, mailing lists - Keep in contact with people who are having problems, and put people having similar problems in contact to see if they can't solve the problem themselves, together - Poke a developer now again about outstanding problems to see if anything's happened People should feel free to exert pressure, but I think the marketing-list would fail utterly if it expected to get this involved in the little details of development. There's enough pressure to get these things right from within the development community anyway, and telling people that you _really_ want them to do something doesn't really make it happen. Target: Public administrators - Go to your local town hall ask to speak to the head of IT - Go to the website of your local town hall/region/county/state, and try to work out who the head of IT is - Use the phone - Figure out which conferences are important to local government decision makers, and make sure there's a GNOME presence there - Make sure feedback gets back to relevant developers Target: Momentum
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Should we be doing DesktopUseCases to help us along ? I think both our development and marketing would be helped (to have organisational focus) by having Personas. A university was working on them a couple of years ago, but that effort seems to have failed. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.html Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Ahoy, On Tuesday 06 December 2005 11:44, Murray Cumming wrote: Should we be doing DesktopUseCases to help us along ? I think both our development and marketing would be helped (to have organisational focus) by having Personas. A university was working on them a couple of years ago, but that effort seems to have failed. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.ht ml I thought you all might be interested in some work that a new KDE promo volunteer is doing on market segmentation: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-promom=113384904704134w=2 Kind regards, Tom -- I'm aware that e-mails to me may be blocked by my host because they are mistaken as spam. If this happens, please e-mail me at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 12:24 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote: There were criticisms in there of Nautilus, the menu editor, performance and usage of GNOME VFS (without specifics, it has to be said). Did those ever get sent back to the Nautilus developers? How about a proposal to include SMEG in 2.14? OK, but don't think it's going to help our marketing to have a discussion about whether spatial nautilus is good or not, as long as this mailing list remains as poorly informed about the user experience as the average slashdot commenter. As an outsider butting in :o), I would say it does, and being poorly informed probably helps this list more than it hinders it. I'm not sure what model most people have of marketing (in terms of, how does it actually work, and how do you seek to achieve things using it?), but for me the idea is that you're trying to get someone to draw a conclusion or make a decision based on the materials/information you give them - usually, a decision to buy (which may not be the case here). The most convincing argument you usually hear is the one you make to yourself. Now, you aren't able to do that by arguing the toss with someone: the customer is always right, no matter what the circumstance. If people don't like Nautilus, they're right, whether you agree or not. The goal of marketing wrt. Nautilus, then, might be to tell people about the cool stuff it does, so that they can draw different conclusions (and if they don't, well, that tells you something ;) This is similar to your organic food producer: going around telling people that they are slowly poisoning themselves and what they're eating is wrong is unlikely to win sales; telling people that organic food is totally natural and selling the lifestyle to them, on the other hand, seems to work wonders - in the UK, the market for organic food has grown 1000% over the last decade (confirming, in part, that choice of lifestyle is one of the largest factors in modern marketing: people have an ideal about how they live, and purchase products which match that ideal). So, going back to marketing, selling people on usability is more than You're wrong, and here's my study which proves it - most people wouldn't be convinced by that, and is a reason I think Microsoft's TCO advertising fails miserably (in contrast to their rather good WXP TV advertising). But, usability is a big feature of GNOME, and is surely relevant to all the sectors any marketing strategy would attempt to target. It has to be possible to market that in a way that doesn't say We do this better than you. And also, before I relurk again, I would suggest not trying to do too much too soon - i.e., start small. Personally, I would attempt to hit developers: getting people enthused about the GNOME platform to build cool stuff for it. Developers build demand, users drive it IMHO - MS have been fantastic at that in the past. Beagle, dashboard, F-spot, that kind of app already generates buzz and excitement. There are surely some quick wins there. Cheers, Alex. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: getting information is the start - when their information retrieval contributes to technical decisions in a project, our marketing will begin to be more successful. Fine. But when that getting information is obviously stalled then it can't be allowed to stop us. Momentum is important, I agree. We do know what our users want, and we do know what they are like. Sure we do, in general. And we're making good software, in general. And yet, there are a bunch of points which have come up repeatedly as annoyances (and thus a usability issue) in GNOME reviews and articles - having a preference in Nautilus to change to the browser view, having Nautilus places and GTK+ bookmarks be shared, etc. I don't know what progress (if any) is being made on some of these things. I don't know if they're considered priority items at this stage. I think we also overestimate the value of this targetting: - Ubuntu have very generic emotional marketing materials, yet I think we would like their kind of success. Ubuntu targetted momentum users early, and are reaping rewards. - Use Debian, and get developer buy-in from the Debian community - Use GNOME, and get developer buy-in from GNOME community - Hire community leaders from both as advocates They've also directly targetted hardware vendors - their hardware database, and contracts with HP and others to certify hardware, will make them a good choice for pre-install on OEM desktops and laptops. When that happens, it won't have been by accident. To consider Ubuntu's marketing as unfocussed would be wrong. They woprked very hard early on to get community involvement, and in effect turned the Debian and GNOME projects into their marketing department. - Firefox also have a very wide market with a very generic product, and marketed successfuly to that wide market.. They didn't decide to target scientific users or educational users. (Yes, I know they had a slightly easier delivery method.) Have you forgotten that Firefox/Mozilla was an early-adopter fringe product for years before jumping the chasm? And by conventional marketing wisdom, with 10% market share they still haven't crossed the chasm (although I think it's fair to say that they have). When 1.0 came out, spreadfirefox.org was instrumental in their momentum. Again, their improvements have been entirely early-adopter/community driven. They got the cutting edge on board, and those guys helped them jump up in market share. And Mozilla has not *just* been marketing that way - they also have a classical marketing department, looking for big corporate support contracts, sending sales reps out to see what the big customers need, and making sure that Firefox gives it to them. OK, but don't think it's going to help our marketing to have a discussion about whether spatial nautilus is good or not I agree. But perhaps feedback from us will change the priority of a change up the chain? Spatial's great, I love it, it took me a while to get used to it. But there's a reason Ubuntu changed it. Yes. But a) what are the suggestions, and b) should we wait for one. a) I made a bunch. Anyone interested in taking on part of that project please contact me, or mail on-list. b) No. Marketing strategies can be developed in parallel, and we can certainly do some general communication promotion without addressing the needs of specific market segments. People should feel free to exert pressure, but I think the marketing-list would fail utterly if it expected to get this involved in the little details of development. There's enough pressure to get these things right from within the development community anyway, and telling people that you _really_ want them to do something doesn't really make it happen. I see all of this more as an organic, person to person thing. Here's a scenario. 1. Article gets published by someone giving out about GNOME. 2. Someone mails author asking him about specifics for a given problem 3. The someone creates a few Bugzilla entries, or adds comments in relevant bugzillas 4. The someone gets on to a developer in the project being given out about, perhaps on IRC, perhaps by mail. Just to say hi, tell him about the comments, maybe point to the bugzilla, and ask him what he thinks. 5. The developer thinks the concerns are irrelevant, and explains why - Mail author back 6. The developer agrees that thing X is a pain - Ask if it's planned during the next devel cycle. 7. If it is, tell author. If it isn't, ask for it to be. Or maybe contact the board ask them to put up a bounty for feature X. Or maybe try it yourself. 8. A month later, another article gives out about the same thing. Mail the author, add comments to bugzilla, touch base with the dev eloper (Hi, thought you might be interested in this article: the guy really wants the frobniz fixed - same complaint we got from (previous author) - has anyone shown interest in fixing
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: getting information is the start - when their information retrieval contributes to technical decisions in a project, our marketing will begin to be more successful. Fine. But when that getting information is obviously stalled then it can't be allowed to stop us. Momentum is important, I agree. We do know what our users want, and we do know what they are like. Sure we do, in general. And we're making good software, in general. And yet, there are a bunch of points which have come up repeatedly as annoyances (and thus a usability issue) in GNOME reviews and articles - having a preference in Nautilus to change to the browser view, having Nautilus places and GTK+ bookmarks be shared, etc. I don't know what progress (if any) is being made on some of these things. I don't know if they're considered priority items at this stage. They are done. They were done as quickly as possible. To consider Ubuntu's marketing as unfocussed would be wrong. They woprked very hard early on to get community involvement, and in effect turned the Debian and GNOME projects into their marketing department. They went totally against the grain of most debian development, thankfully. Just because they used what they had doesn't mean that their developers were their target users. But we're splitting hairs here, I suppose. - Firefox also have a very wide market with a very generic product, and marketed successfuly to that wide market.. They didn't decide to target scientific users or educational users. (Yes, I know they had a slightly easier delivery method.) Have you forgotten that Firefox/Mozilla was an early-adopter fringe product for years before jumping the chasm? Everything has to start somewhere. We have early adopters (and users too). What's next? [snip] I have zero way to get the information that people seem to be asking for before they'll get moving on marketing What information do people seem to be asking for? And who is the they? The several people on this thread who are basically saying Stop, this is not the best way. I'll hold off for another month in case people suddenly come up with some strategy for getting this information or moving on without it. If not, I'll try again to get things moving anyway. No, don't hold off, carry on. Bring the slogan idea to a head, though - we should pick some, and be done with it. I'd prefer to push that when people can support it. If nothing improves after a month then it should be easier to support. Really, the slogan is not very interesting - it's just good to have one. I'm far more interested in a simple emotional campaign that let's people show their support and feel good about doing it. Murray Cumming [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.murrayc.com www.openismus.com -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
hi again, and thanks to all for replying. i'll try to answer some of your comments, at least from my point of view. The selling/advertising does not stop you from doing marketing. Should we stop going to trade fairs, close down our website, and stop announcing releases while we wait for the traditional marketing to reach step one? it's not me, it's us. we are supposed to be a marketing team, so we're supposed to be focused in pretty much the same direction (not 100% the same, but at least the basics). that's why i'm trying to gather some consensus, instead of starting yet another individual uncoordinated effort. and no i'm not suggesting let's not advertise, but let's not put the focus in advertising. imho we can't put our focus in advertising until we agree on the basics: what our target market is, what they want, what we have to offer to them, and what we can do to fix those things they want. The target market discussion is another one which we've had at least 3 times. I'm pretty clear on what our target markets should be: ok you're pretty clear on that, but is there a consensus? i don't mean absolute consensus, but are we at least pointing in the same direction? if we are, i haven't seen it. and if we're not, is it too crazy to suggest that we work on a minimum agreement? ... answers to the following questions for each of those target markets. - What do we have to offer? - What are we missing? - What are we doing to fill the gaps? - What could we be doing that we're not? - How can we get at the people involved? i agree 100%, and that's why i don't like the let's advertise, marketing will come later approach: what will you advertise (and how and to whom) if you don't have answers to those questions? A slogan is the core of most campaigns. With a theme and a suitable slogan we can start a little campaign. Because the theme and slogan will be vague ... advertising (amongst other things) builds positioning, and positioning IS the brand. you can't go for a certain positioning in people's minds, and the next year go for a completely different one... coherence is one of the keys in communication. if you're not gonna be coherent, you better don't say anything. so a slogan/theme can be vague, but it MUST be coherent with your positioning, which must be coherent trough time. for example, i've read the beautiful slogans many times, and that's obviously not coherent with the positioning i think we have (or should have). gnome is not simply beautiful (as in pretty with no other purpose), that's kde... gnome is elegant, cool, the beauty of simplicity like they said before (there you have one coherent slogan, which merges two of our core strenghts: elegance and ease-of-use). anyway, we can't discuss slogans without discussing positioning; that's my point. If we don't plan to target these people differently, then there isn't much point in targetting them separately. i still think we should target them differently (within the same coherent positioning, of course), but that's one more thing we should try to agree on, before proceeding in different directions. This was the list's problem from the start; I believe. I was intended to stimulate promotion -- not marketing. uh... ok. then maybe you chose the wrong name, and john williams wrote the wrong article :) * No 'exclusive' influence on developers or product decisions. Even the board is unable to do that. i never meant let's make developers our slaves :) i just said it'd be much more efficient if we sent user feedback (like the one i compiled) in the name of the gnome marketing team, with the endorsement of several gnome foundation directors. yes, i could file yet another bug in bugzilla in my name, but that doesn't sound like the optimal channel, does it? there's a reason why we are the gnome marketing team... I agree that we have a problem empowering people. People on the list seem to be waiting for direction (from you, me or Luis...). no i'm not waiting for anyone's direction; i have my own, thank you :) what i suggested is that we should ALL try to come up with a marketing strategy; this is supposed to be a team and not a sum of individual efforts. it's not like john makes the strategy and murray makes the advertising and andreas makes the posters; all those efforts must be coordinated and coherent, because minimum consensus must be reached within any team, no matter the cost. and when i talked about huge names, i wasn't asking for direction but endorsement for particular actions. How good is our feedback loop? What Santiago is saying, if I understand correctly, is that right now we don't seem to have one, and one would be nice. that's exactly what i was saying: if we have no effective channel to deliver the feedback we gather, towards the ones who should be getting it (developers), what's the point in collecting that feedback? * There's no way to break
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
En/na Dave Neary ha escrit:
I forgot spreadgnome.org (although I think we should choose another
name). A community promotion site is essential for all this.
Why the GNOME promotion can't fit in gnome.org? In my opinion gnome.org
without prefixes should be mainly a GNOME promotion site: about, facts,
success stories, press releases, marketing materials, merchandising,
GNOME promotion kit, gateways to the next layout of collaboration with
the GNOME project... (all of them with prefixes: foundation, developer,
art, live, planet and so on).
I was thinking what are the GNOME entry points. gnome.org should be the
main one but there are more.
In my own case ('early adopter' could be my label) I remember
gnomedesktop.org and gnomesupport.org looked like the access points.
What do you think about these sites? Then the GNOME Hispano meetings and
the GUADEC. gnome.org never gave much to me as an interested user.
The planet was also interesting if you wanted to feel part of, even if
it was just by following it. Some posts were too technical but they
looked cool, specially when they attached colored code or graphics ;).
Some other looked to me offtopic offGNOME but since this is an open
community I guessed this was allowed, I thought.
Now I guess I'm inside and I have lost the perspective.
The entry points, we need to take care of them.
--
Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org
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Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Santiago Roza wrote: it's not me, it's us. we are supposed to be a marketing team, so we're supposed to be focused in pretty much the same direction (not 100% the same, but at least the basics). that's why i'm trying to gather some consensus, instead of starting yet another individual uncoordinated effort. Consensus might not be desirable for the marketing team. On some things, sure - but we will need people acting as individuals, with all their quirks, as long as we're on the same page and all working. Roughly designated target markets exist already. While you don't think there's a huge concensus around these, I disagree. A big list of stuff we can do exists. We're not short actions. We need to put names to each of these. I'll put this list in the wiki later... * Create personas for each of our target markets * For each target market, identify - our strengths - market needs - our weaknesses - how we address them - our approach for the target (this could be done through the personas) * Initiate a couple of programs, with clear goals and a simple path for someone to spend a couple of hours on GNOME. University outreach and local government outreach are two that are doable with big potential. - University outreach: Have one person for each region get a list of university computer societies and contact details, and solicit their help. - Get them to organise GNOME presentations where someone from GNOME goes along to do a talk - Send out posters - Get IT department contacts for universities while we're at it. As the computer clubs, they'll know the people already. * Organise for each of the target markets. We need a shared rolodex for distribution, government, press and momentum user contacts. We need people who know who they are going to try to contact, how, what their message will be, what questions we'd like to ask, what we can do with the answers. * Develop a strategy for getting data gathered by the marketing team to developers. * Around our central theme of simplicity, usability, power to the user, work on posters, banners, get them printed and get them out to user groups and university outreach groups. They're no good if they never get seen. * Get involved in organising GUADEC. It's the most public face of the project, and some marketing is needed. People with press contacts, spare time, some clue about what our community expects from its flagship conference, subscribe to guadec-list and guadec-planning, or mail myself or Quim. ok you're pretty clear on that, but is there a consensus? Yeah. Claus disagrees with me on a couple of them, but we're all pretty much on the same page. i agree 100%, and that's why i don't like the let's advertise, marketing will come later approach: what will you advertise (and how and to whom) if you don't have answers to those questions? Well, what we have now is pretty good. We have a product, a user-driven design philosophy, a decent track record and a bunch of stuff we're proud of. Talking about what we're proud of is good. no i'm not waiting for anyone's direction; i have my own, thank you :) Grand. What would you like to do, then? We can fix goals, but people have to drive themselves towards those goals. Communication is vitally important when we don't see each other face to face very often, so we have a list, we have a (very quiet) IRC channel, we have the GNOME Journal, we have the wiki, we will soon have, quite probably, a drupal. So: * Set goals * Let people off to drive towards those goals * Auto-correct course en route if we get off-course. What do you want out of the GNOME marketing team? What are you doing to get towards that goal? Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Murray Cumming wrote: I think both our development and marketing would be helped (to have organisational focus) by having Personas. A university was working on them a couple of years ago, but that effort seems to have failed. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.html So - who wants to take this on? (don't be shy) Cheers, Dave. -- David Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Consensus might not be desirable for the marketing team. On some things, sure - but we will need people acting as individuals, with all their quirks, as long as we're on the same page and all working. i meant consensus on objectives, basic strategy, and a couple more things, not killing everyone's criterion :) Roughly designated target markets exist already. While you don't think there's a huge concensus around these, I disagree. yes we know there are many possible segments, but we haven't agreed on which ones to focus on. Grand. What would you like to do, then? all those things i wrote in my first email and their followups; basically changing our focus from advertising to real marketing. but again, i can't do that alone, since i like to see this as a team. there's no point in me working on a marketing strategy, if the rest of the team thinks that's a minor detail we shouldn't be wasting time with, while there are much more important things like advertising gnome (no matter gnome's positioning) to the people (no matter who the people are), ignoring external users' feedback because those are just meaningless gripes :) What do you want out of the GNOME marketing team? What are you doing to get towards that goal? i want us to be the ones who collect users' feedback, process it, pass it to developers in effective ways, and restart the process with each release. and of course, the ones who analyse gnome's strenghts and weaknesses (either real or perceived) in relation to users' needs, and design a brand strategy based on that. then we can design a comunicational strategy, in order to advertise effectively (and with a sound basis). what i am doing towards that goal? well first i'm trying to get as many of us as possible behind my proposal, and then i guess i could be contributing with most of those tasks. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.html So - who wants to take this on? (don't be shy) this sounds interesting, but it also sounds like dozens of hours of work... and unluckily i can't afford to waste that kind of time until we have decent channels of communication with the developers. and i say waste not because i don't think the job is interesting, but because i'm afraid it'll end up in the (gnome :P) trashcan just like the 2.12 feedback list. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 09:21:17PM -0300, Santiago Roza wrote: Well said, and I concur. cool! one reply, and it wasn't an insult! :P Well, I hope our community isn't so bad as that one would expect insults and ridicule when giving critical feedback! :P :) sri -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Well, I hope our community isn't so bad as that one would expect insults and ridicule when giving critical feedback! :P no not at all, it was just a joke. -- Santiago Roza Departamento I+D - Thymbra [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 03:44:20PM -0300, Santiago Roza wrote: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-December/msg00482.html So - who wants to take this on? (don't be shy) this sounds interesting, but it also sounds like dozens of hours of work... and unluckily i can't afford to waste that kind of time until we have decent channels of communication with the developers. and i say waste not because i don't think the job is interesting, but because i'm afraid it'll end up in the (gnome :P) trashcan just like the 2.12 feedback list. It's our achilles heel. We are really bad at making decisions and we seem to have a microcsm of that going on here as well. :-) The usability list probably got trashed because nobody had the drive to smack this through. rant if we picked a good VCS that allows us to try out ideas that fit into marketing, usability or what not without having to worry about trust; decision-making would be a lot easier. /rant sri -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 11:37:24AM +0100, Dave Neary wrote: Claus Schwarm wrote: * No 'exclusive' influence on developers or product decisions. Even the board is unable to do that. Ahem. The board *shouldn't* do that. Not the same thing. We are a sub-group of the GNOME project. If we have some suggestions for Nautilus, backed up with real user feedback, I am sure we will have more weight than any old Joe Bloggs. We haven't tested the theory yet, though. Not true. The decision to use spatial in nautilus was done by a lot of talking to Alex and Dave by the usability team. It took them awhile to convince them to do it. So it's possible to convince devs. In fact, I would argue that the newer maintainers are a lot less anal about things than those in the past. Using bugzilla and a little data, and maybe some kind of test environment to show it. (ahem.. see prev rant. ) sri -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
Hi, Santiago Roza wrote: not particularly. It's beautiful to a very strange niche. a very strange niche... that seems to be a bigger userbase than ours :( anyway, i wasn't saying kde looks good (cause it doesn't imho), but it does focus on pretty with no other purpose, while we don't. so we shouldn't be pushing that concept, cause that would be suicidal positioning :) In general, I think we should avoid the KDE vs GNOME rhetoric. Not just because we're on the same side (free software desktop), but also because we lose sight of the 95% market share monster if we get caught up in turf wars. If you want to compare GNOME to something, compare it to windows or MacOS X. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lyon, France -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
I don't really want to start a thread on VCS here. But see this thread: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2005-May/msg1.html My long ass post about it is in: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2005-May/msg00036.html Hope that helps. sri -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?
On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 15:35 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote: On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 08:15:24PM -0300, Santiago Roza wrote: in other words, i'd like to see more marketing, and less selling/advertising... at least until we know what we have, what customers need, and what we could do to offer that to them (not to mention finding out who they are). Well said, and I concur. Of late we've seem to be going in circles, so you're criticism I think has merit. :-) I suspect the reason we are doing what we are doing is because we have no concrete ideas on how to find out what people want. Perhaps i'm thinking too simple about this, but we do have quite some user groups, and those user groups go to quite some conventions. Now i'm not entirely sure if this would work, or would even give any sort of usable results. But wouldn't it be possible to produce some forms, Where users could fill in what they expect of gnome what they need of gnome and what they think of gnome. although everybody of course hates to fill in forms. -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
