Re: GNOME 3.0 Marketing Brainstorming #1 - Audiences

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Paul Cutler <pcutler foresightlinux org> wrote:
> I'll grab the easy one:  Users
>
> So far we have:
>
> * Users

As Brian was saying, users is too broad. Lord knows I love all of
them, but we're probably best off focusing on specific groups of users
that are within reach. An offhand list:

* accessibility-challenged users. (dash of realism: the last time we
tried to do this seriously, the answer was 'you people haven't
actually tried to *use* your a11y software, have you.' We need to make
sure that is not the case this time.)

* enterprises: 2.0 had a successful message in this space: cheap,
reliable, easy-to-train-on b/c easy to use but not too dissimilar to
Windows. 3.0 will have a harder time because it will likely lose the
'fairly similar to windows' tag, but the other things should still be
strong.

* relatedly to the previous, w/ similar issues: pre-existing gnome 2.x
users generally. Need to convince them that the upgrade and changes
are worthwhile. Not all of them will be on board, but we need to
enlist them- get them to be our biggest cheerleaders, both by selling
them on the new stuff but also (importantly) explaining to them what
changes were made and why. They are going to lose features they liked;
we have to explain to them why the new ones are better. If we do that
well they'll turn around and tell others.

* free software influencers: convince them that gnome 3 Is The Future
of the Free Software Desktop. (again, have to actually execute really,
really well, and have a persuasive story for this one.) But this is an
important group of users to acquire. (Here I will again drag out my
old proposed GNOME slogan: 'GNOME: the Heart of the Free Software
Desktop.')

* college compsci students: these are the next wave of our developers;
lets reach out to them at a time when they have lots of time and
energy to experiment. Ideally this branches out from not 'just'
marketing into educational and training outreach- get them to work on
gnome projects and such, like Mozilla does.

* 'low functionality' windows users- windows users who live 95% in
their browser already (lots of parents, grandparents here- don't use
many apps, don't use many peripherals). Pitch them on having firefox,
and the rest being virus free and easy to use.

* (if somehow the product blows our minds): normal windows users.
focus on security but also the awesome new features. Again, depends on
actually having awesome new features, and (ideally) a suite of apps
that integrate them. b/c both of these are still somewhat
hypothetical, a major push on this front may have to wait.

HTH-
Luis

> * Linux distributions
> * Media
> * Developers
>
> Who else comes to mind?
>
> Paul
>
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Paul Cutler <pcutler foresightlinux org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Luis, this is perfect, thanks for kicking it off!
>>
>> Paul
>>
>> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Luis Villa <luis tieguy org> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Paul Cutler <pcutler foresightlinux org>
>>> wrote:
>>> > Hello marketing team!
>>> >
>>> > As we think about GNOME 3.0, who are our target audiences?  (Who should
>>> > the
>>> > marketing team be bulding messages for?)
>>>
>>> I know I've written on this before, but I can't find it. :(
>>>
>>> Because I'm short on time, some important audiences that we have
>>> tended to forget at times in our marketing:
>>>
>>> * Distros: the reality is that they make the default choice that
>>> determines what most of our users see. If we don't sell them on 3.x,
>>> our users will continue to use 2.x, as simple as that.
>>>
>>> * Linux Media: the various and sundry Linux media have a big say in
>>> what people perceive as 'the' Linux Desktop. Sadly, this is a fairly
>>> dysfunctional media, so telling them 'here is why Real People are
>>> going to be sold on 3.0' is a sometimes, but not always, effective
>>> technique.
>>>
>>> * Developers: they need to know why they should integrate with GNOME
>>> technologies, and particularly with whatever new ones we come up with.
>>> We need them to buy into it to build our ecosystem.
>>>
>>> Sorry I can't be more verbose-
>>> Luis
>>
>
>
> --
> marketing-list mailing list
> marketing-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
>
>