Re: Formalizing the marketing team

[John Williams <john williams lists gmail com>]

On Sun, 2007-07-29 at 21:45 +0300, Quim Gil wrote:
(lots of good stuff)
> There is a Marketing Team defined as committee and it's time to define
> it. This is an invitation for a brainstorming.
Can we do it on IRC, as Ken (and others?) tried previously?

> - We need at least a mission. Our nearest reference currently is
> "Goals" at http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing :
>
> # Increase awareness of GNOME
> # Increase the user base of GNOME
> # Ease user contributions at GNOME
These are all about advertising and selling.  That is only part of
marketing. 

What about "improving the product"?  What about "listening to customers"?

If our goal is to increase the number of people using GNOME, first we
must ask ourselves about the AIDA process:

Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action

Which of these stages is the bottleneck.  We seem to be presuming it is
Awareness or perhaps Interest.  But do we really know?

At this stage I must say this: I love GNOME and there is no way I will
ever forsake it.  However I cannot in good conscience encourage friends
to use it for practical reasons (it works at least as good as, if not
better than the alternatives) as opposed to philosophical reasons.
Until we get the quality issues sorted I think we risk a negative
backlash:

"Here kids, try this!", 

<they try it, and it sucks>

"Hey everyone, this GNOME crap sucks!"

Is that what we want?

> I think that it is good to have a well defined list of reliable member
> with clear responsibilities and active participation in a decision
> process. 
Agreed.  Sorry to be so negative above.  Perhaps we could start with a
list of what actually needs to be done, and then people could throw
their hats in the ring?