Re: One-word poll

["Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com>]

> On Fri, 2005-12-02 at 08:14 -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
>> On 12/2/05, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:
>> > Easy, Friendly, and Quality seem to be leading over my own favourite
>> > Beautiful. Does someone with marketing experience know which of these
>> > might be  the most productive choice?
> Well, I have marketing experience, but only as an academic.  A "practical"
> marketer knows what has worked for them, in their context, in the past.
> As an academic I study what lots of practical marketers have tried and
> what the results were, and then I try to make meaningful generalisations.
> If that's the perspective you are after, perhaps I can help.
>
> Unfortunately the unsufferable academic in me forces me answer your
> question with another question: what do you mean by "productive"?

It would be productive for me if it encouraged end users to think of
computers with GNOME as better computers, or at least put the GNOME logo
and name in their heads. To do that, I think the campaign needs to be
complelling, attractive, inspirational, sexy, etc.

Some people may want to target decision-makers directly or target someone
more precisley, but a) they aren't doing that either yet in any big way,
and b) I'm suggesting a simplistic emotional marketing campaign that
leaves the details as secondary.

>  And
> productive for whom?  I am not being combatitive here (I hope), merely
> seeking clarification.
>
> If you want some "solid facts" I can statistically analyse the data for
> you to test whether the differences are "significant".

I don't think that's so useful. At this point we are looking for something
good enough, and not obviously broken, so we can start something. Our
marketing strategy can be periodically improved as long as we haven't
completely ruined our reputations.

Free software projects are outside the experience of most marketing
people, whether commercial or academic. I think this is another reason to
start off with something simple.

We might not be the perfect "client", but if we we had a big budget then
marketing experts would still be finding every way to work with what there
is, and finding a way to get started even when full research is
impossible, and even when the client itself can't decide _exactly_ what it
wants to be.

[snip]

Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com