Re: The "What is GNOME?" Answer

[John Williams <jwilliams business otago ac nz>]

On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 17:31 +0100, Claus Schwarm wrote:


> And, by the way, the given slogan is nearly true. Read is as "Linux made easy"
> and there you have the GNOME USP. 
I could not agree more.  However, even then it's not really optimal,
because it implies that GNOME is _only_ for Linux.  (From a cognitive
psychology, not logical, viewpoint!)

 
> To express this in engineers talk:  you like to 
> optimize recollection of the USP within the contraint of the _very_ restricted
> attention of people.
Check.

> There's no other way to restrict yourself to a few words, and thus you get
> ambigous. Period. But this holds for every competitor!
I don't agree.  But I have only been studying marketing and consumer behaviour for 17 years and won't have my 
PhD for another few months, so I will have to bow to your superior wisdom.

> Another example for engineers: The threat is now three days old and is about changing
> a sentence which will hardly read by anyone on the "about" page. Additionally, we
> don't even utilize the few miliseconds attention to support the basic USP. That's
> inefficiency at its best.
I agree, but I thought the plan was to come up with a standard message that would be used on the WWW site 
_and_ in other places; perhaps even becoming as standard as the foot logo.

Jeff, is that true?

> Please, buy a good book about cognitive psychology before you next question basic
> marketing techniques. I would do the same if I would try to question your code.
You can't question my code! (Because I haven't inflicted any on the
world.)  :-)

And I teach consumer behaviour (i.e. cognitive and social psychology for
business people) so I would be interested in reading more about this
area.  Could you recommend a few good texts?  I'm sure that others on
the list would be interested also.


> P.S.: People don't like car salers, not marketeers, btw! ;-D
They don't like all types of sales people, and advertising people as
well.  Unfortunately, most people think that marketing _is_ simply
selling and advertising.  I can send you a few papers on this if you
wish.