Re: real marketing or just catchy slogans?

["Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com>]

[snip]
> so a slogan/theme can be vague, but it MUST be coherent with your
> positioning, which must be coherent trough time.  for example, i've
> read the "beautiful" slogans many times, and that's obviously not
> coherent with the positioning i think we have (or should have).
>
> gnome is not "simply beautiful" (as in "pretty with no other
> purpose"),

Yes, that's an interepretation that we would want to avoid.

> that's kde...

not particularly. It's beautiful to a very strange niche.

> gnome is elegant, cool, "the beauty of
> simplicity" like they said before (there you have one coherent slogan,
> which merges two of our core strenghts: elegance and ease-of-use).
>
> anyway, we can't discuss slogans without discussing positioning;
> that's my point.

It looks to me like "Friendly" is the more popular of the simple themes,
and one that clearly overlaps with various of the aims for our software
and community.

I'm assuming that "Quality" doesn't quite have the emotional component
that I'm looking for.

> i just said it'd be much more efficient if we sent user feedback (like
> the one i compiled)

Please do try to mention URLs when referring to something you've published
previously. It gives us another chance to respond to it.

I vaguely remember that I didn't bother responding because it seemed to be
a very random sample of osnews-commenters pet gripes that weren't likely
to be of interest to many other users. I could be wrong, and I'm sorry for
not commenting on it at first. I was probably busy, and I probably was
trying not to be too negative.

> in the name of the gnome marketing team, with the
> endorsement of several gnome foundation directors.
>
> yes, i could file yet another bug in bugzilla in my name, but that
> doesn't sound like the optimal channel, does it?  there's a reason why
> we are the gnome marketing team...

There was a usability review team that did this periodically, but it's not
very active now that it's fixed the big problems.

[snip]

> i'd rather see one step in a coherent direction (decided by consensus
> of course), than one hundred individual uncoordinated steps.

Very few people are doing anything, and very few people are offering
leadership or strategy, so lack of coordination is not a problem at the
moment.  Suggestions such as Dave's are a very good start and something
worth helping with.


>> we have a great product: GNOME. Many marketing teams are just in the
>> opposite solution: as a team they are great and well organised but they
>> need to sell crap.
>>
>> I much prefer our situation.
>
> sadly, maybe i'd prefer the other.  an organized marketing team with a
> crappy product could find out what's wrong, come up with ways to fix
> it, get those things fixed, come up with a new branding strategy, and
> then advertise the product (and 6 = profit!!! :P).

At this point, I really think there isn't much wrong with the product
(beyond new features that are being done as quickly as possible), and the
users who discover it are loving it. I think we need to let the rest know
about it. This is not a new product that needs a lot of analysis in the
design stages.

> we, on the other hand, have a great product but can't do much about
> it, at least within our current situation  :(

If it's great, then you don't need to do much about that.

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