Re: Formalizing the marketing team

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi, Quim!

I tend to disagree to your analysis. Let me explain.

The web revamp project, for example, has a rather well defined list of
members. It has clear responsibilities. And it has a rather clear
decision process. It's under specific management for over a year and
while there was some progress, it's still not done, yet.

This is NOT meant to be offensive, it's just an example. I can add some
other examples from recent years.

Examples such as this one shows that a better decision process is not
sufficient for getting things done.

Looking at some of your points, there's also not much disagreement on
the marketing goals. These are more or less clear.

We also have enough suggestions on creating certain marketing tools. I
know I have made quite a few during the last three or four years. Many
of them were blocked, but that does not meant we had no suggestions,
right?

What we really do disagree on is the creation, the artwork, the
message, the design. 

Since design by committee has not be proven successful in the past, I
doubt it will be different with a marketing management. Unless you want
to pay to people for creating the material we'd need.

There's another aspect that John just mentioned: "Ask any salesperson
what the number one factor in their success is, and they will tell you
that it is the genuine belief that what they are selling will be good
for the customer."

Again, it's not the only aspect for a good salesperson but it's one of
the most important. Any active salesperson I know has at least one
motivation book around. This is due to the high rejection rate in
active selling that no honest person can easily deal with. It's the
most difficult aspect of selling.

Having trust in the product is thus a major relief. This is a more
worrying aspect of GNOME marketing from a sales perspective IMO: Lack
of trust into the insight of developers to the needs of marketing. The
best example for me is still the disaster of Nautilus' spacial
behaviour.

Anyway, this is just a note of caution that we shouldn't expect too much
from better decision management. Of course, I'll help on any specific
request if you want me to and my time permits it.


Cheers,
Claus


On Sun, 29 Jul 2007 21:45:29 +0300
"Quim Gil" <qgil gnome org> wrote:

> The board is in the process of formalizing some groups contributing to
> th goals of the GNOM Foundation as defined committees. Examples of
> well defined commitees are the Release Team and the GUADEC
> organization.
> 
> There is a Marketing Team defined as committee and it's time to define
> it. This is an invitation for a brainstorming.
> 
> - 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
> 
> Let's review this.
> 
> - We also need to decide if there is a defined membership of this
> team/committee. See http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/MarketingTeam
> . We would have also the members of marketing-private, the almost
> inactive list were press releases used to be worked out.
> 
> 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. We have seen many discussions in this list ending up in
> almost nothing, and IMHO one of the causes of this problem has been
> the lack of a clear decision process.
> 
> -- 
> Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org
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