[Marketing] Our message

[David Farning]

For the non-marketing people:)  Marketing is pretty individualized to projects.

Mozilla and Ubuntu are looking for the mass market.
Mozilla has nailed the just works, one click installers.  There is
_no_ learning curve to installing and using Mozilla products.

Ubuntu is focusing on the grass roots, or community, to sell and
promote their products.  The live cd is getting pretty good.  But,
there is still a much higher barrior to enty to installing and using
Ubuntu than FireFox.  A good chunk of Ubuntu's budget goes towards
shipit.

Fedora focuses on the developer community.  A good chuck of their
budget goes to FudCons and developing the developer community.

Ubuntu and Fedora are approaching the issue from opposite directions.

The kernel is interesting because they 'sell' to the distributions
rather then endusers.  They hold formal conferences where participates
share knowledge and receive recognition for their work.

MySQL focuses on paying business who have a specific need for their
product.  Official MySQL partners are prohibited by contract from
talking about the community editions of MySQL as solutions for their
customers.

The closest existing match for Sugar Labs is Eclipse.  Eclipse is a
endusers product, but eclipse, like Sugar, is given away for free.
The marketing mission of the eclipse foundation is build the
ecosystem.  The other organizations in the ecosystem then fund the
Eclipse foundation by various partner and advisory board agreements.

Sugar Labs is in the business of developing both the platform and the ecosystem.
Thus we have several different constituencies:

Developers - Sugar Labs must appeal to and engage developers to make
Sugar great.
Distributions/Resellers - Sugar Labs must appeal to ISV and deployment
support organizations to 'sell' Sugar to end users.
Content developers - Sugar must appeal to content developers as mean
for them to distribute and 'sell' their content.
Educators - Sugar must appeal to educators as tool to help teach kids.

Currently, the marketing team is working on brand recognition[1].  As
the project grows and matures, it will need to start marketing towards
theses constituencies or work with it's partners to market Sugar.

david

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> The current problem with our marketing/PR materials is one of resources :-/
>
> Most of the hard stuff (vision, positioning, strategy, logo &
> typography, contact info) is worked out
>
> But, the legwork needs to be done:
>
> * writing copy
> * developing and selecting visuals
> * arranging elements on the page
> * translating
>
> For the record, I promised Caroline I would do our first 2-page PDF
> brochure at least a month ago
>
> I'm behind since I've been putting out other fires: last Wednesday's
> press release in two languages, the targeted mailings, manual
> submissions to key sites & journalists; new contacts (we are over 400
> now). But I have other emergencies: the Spanish version which hasn't
> gone out yet... and no text of other languages received yet. After
> that, I need to update last month's press release in the 3 additional
> languages I have received (thanks translators)... and during this time
> Christian has done a super job of making the pres page easier to use
> (and more improvements coming)
>
> The "shortcuts" to raising awareness are:
> 1. Have great product.
> 2. Get a respected journalist to rave about it.
>
> That said, there is quite a lot of work behind the "shortcuts" (quite
> a lot more in point 1 I daresay).
>
> Although it's always interesting to look at good ideas, the dark arts
> of communication almost always involve factors specific to a
> company/project/individual/government. If it was easy, all projects
> would be well-known :-) I like the example of Firefox: take the New
> York Times ad which I had the honor to sign with 9,999 other people;
> it was the first mass media marketing manifesto by a FOSS project.
> And, Mozilla does a great job with multiplatform, pancake-button
> one-click installers, branding and logo, differentiation, and
> ecosystem with their add-ons. But, I would not for a moment want to
> copy what they do in marketing/PR... because the target users are
> different, the complexity level is different, and... they have tens of
> millions of dollars in a foundation backing them up. Other FOSS
> projects (perhaps most) are surely well-managed technically, but are
> underwater in the PR sense and from whom we won't learn anything at
> all.
>
> What the Marketing Team really needs is more hands... like other teams
> in the project :-)
>
> Fortunately, I have ideas where to find volunteers. But recruitment -
> just like funding, partnerships, distribution, and... an integrated
> well-branded easy-to-navigate website (!) are all topics we need to
> work on simultaneously while choosing immediate priorities carefully.
> I've worked in a startup environment, and we're doing the right
> things, so I'm not worried; but we do need to grow "headcount" to grow
> our project, and Marten is absolutely right that we need marketing
> materials to recruit :-)
>
> thanks
>
> Sean
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 8:42 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 20:07, Marten Vijn <info at martenvijn.nl> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 14:16 -0400, Caroline Meeks wrote:
>>>> Marten
>>>>
>>>> +1 Can you organize this to happen?
>>>
>>> I am sorry but it is not where my talents are.
>>> I am bad at languages and teaching. (dyslectic and impacient).
>>>
>>> My role morely is using SOAS, testing it on some hardware, getting it to
>>> a localschool. And if possible getting people on board (+4 now). And
>>> also (as most of us) my time very limited. I really focus on local
>>> activities.
>>>
>>> >From this role I see a low acceptance by "normal" people. Normal is
>>> defined here: Teachers, kids, parents who are none ict aware. They don't
>>> know were to start to read and have short of time/attention span.
>>>
>>> If this kind of input is not wanted pls let me know (it would save a lot
>>> of typing time).
>>>
>>> Actually floss is bad at doing their PR is general. If i need a
>>> corporate firewall or storage device there are shiny flyers and
>>> documentation. Vendors will come to me and sell me their solution.
>>>
>>> So if I want a *BSD or OpenSolaris to run my storage/firewall it really
>>> is hard to convince my manager (and their directors) to use this FLOSS.
>>>
>>> To change this good materials are needed. So there is good reason to not
>>> have me for this job.
>>
>> Wonder if there are FLOSS projects that are better than the others at
>> PR and on which we could inspire?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Tomeu
>>
>>> kind regards,
>>> Marten
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> http://opencommunitycamp.org         26th Jul - 2nd August
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Marketing mailing list
>>> Marketing at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing
>>>
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