Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

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
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com