[Marketing] [IAEP] Sugar on a Stick v2 Release Naming

[Sean DALY]

http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2009-June/001546.html

found it, was during a (sometimes heated) discussion concerning Sugar
vs. Sugar on a Stick, SoaS referring only to the Fedora distro or not,
and some other topics :-)
basically, a reread of the marketing meetings in June (and the lists)
shows us formulating the plan. The beauty shot of the branded USB
sticks for example was designed to have the colors of the first four
versions of SoaS, and hence be reusable... since we won't have a pro
photographer willing to help us out every time. While I had other
beauty shots of netbooks running Sugar done at the same time which
will aid us for the next launch... at launch time.

To be clear, our marketing ideas are not policies set in stone...
however, they are the fruit of discussion & reflection. A successful
launch (when we are lucky) brings together several factors which bump
up awareness of Sugar. For example, we datelined the June 24th press
release from LinuxTag in Berlin rather than Cambridge; this was part
of the surprise factor which aided us.

Other FOSS projects, distros likely have excellent software
development methods... I can't comment intelligently on that. However,
without naming names, I can say that most of them have sorry marketing
indeed. This is not a reflection on the projects; geeks understand
that they need to do marketing and PR (and of course community
relations and recruitment, which are interrelated), they just don't
have the experience. Although marketing/PR looks ridiculously easy to
do from the outside, the reality is that if it were that easy,
projects wouldn't have so much trouble getting known. The phenomenon
of GNU/Linux desktops failing to gain marketshare on the desktop over
the past decade has everything to do with poor marketing (as well as
stiff - and not always fair - competition).

So rather than seek inspiration from other FOSS projects, I'd much
sooner seek inspiration from organizations/companies/projects which
broke out and grew quickly in recognition. Inspiration, but not
copying: the Spread Firefox campaign for example was very effective
indeed in 2004, but the methods used were specific to the browser
market and the context of the time. We have the fabulous opportunity
to break new ground, and innovate marketing on a shoestring which
spreads the word better than capitalized companies... all we have to
do is be smart, consistent if we can (damage control wastes precious
resources), and create initiatives instead of waiting for the phone to
ring.

Sean.


On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 11:13 PM, Martin Dengler<martin at martindengler.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 10:57:00PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
>> In fact Martin if I remember correctly we had already discussed this
>> on-list... I will try to find the thread.
>
> Please let me know.  I did google for 'sugar "ice cream" soas' before
> I said I couldn't find anything besides the IRC meeting I mentioned.
>
>> The idea is to maximize launch impact by keeping the element of
>> surprise on our side.
>
> Ok...who are we surprising, though?  The journalists?  Won't they be
> surprised anyway, not being subscribed to our lists?  As recent list
> posts have demonstrated[1,2,3], even people subscribed to our lists are
> surprised by content as recent as a few months ago.
>
>> This is also why the ice-cream shop doesn't announce their summer
>> specials in advance
>
> The analogy is not apt for software _development_, though it may be
> apt to _marketing_.  Given Fedora and Ubuntu do announce their
> codenames well in advance of the release, they must be missing out on
> the marketing surprise in preference for the developer sanity (not
> having to remember not to say the code name publicly, or not even know
> what the logo will be until late in the game).
>
> Perhaps Fedora's "each code name is related to the last in an
> insider-known way that it's fun to guess" might be a way to speak to
> both needs?
>
> Or developers can just settle for talking about things in terms of
> integers, which isn't so bad.
>
>> Another idea with the flavor name roughly matching the logo color is
>> for nongeeks to easily identify a SoaS version by mentioning the color
>> of the Sugar logo at boot time. This helps us avoid horrid text and
>> version numbers during the graphic boot sequence.
>
> I think this point is for Yama, right?  You and I both assumed this
> point was self-evident, but I guess it's not.
>
>> You may remember Gary said (after his great green recoloring job on
>> the beauty shot) that he was putting in a vote for Gooseberry
>> (http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting.log.20090609_1104.html)...
>
> Yup, and you mentioned "Apple" before him.  Are you suggesting either
> in place of "Lime"?
>
>> Sean
>
> Martin
>
> 1. "Let's log IRC channels" in
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008186.html
>
> 2. "Can we add a new [!!!] [SoaS] naming scheme [using numbers]?" in
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-September/019000.html
>
> 3. The irony of me saying "oh, did I miss a list post" immediately
> before this is not lost on me.
>