Re: GNOME Marketing Strategy (Was Audiences)

[Claus Schwarm <clschwarm googlemail com>]

On Mon, 2009-05-11 at 11:44 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Paul Cutler
> <pcutler foresightlinux org> wrote:
> > It was an assumption on my part - I was personally focusing on building a
> > plan around "GNOME 3.0 launch" - rather than an overall GNOME marketing
> > plan.
> >
> > A launch plan is different than a marketing strategy, but they do have
> > similar elements.  Re-thinking my approach a little bit.
> 
> Unfortunately you need at least some parts of a marketing plan in
> place to do an effective launch, and (frankly) we really don't have
> those things laid out in any sort of structured way. I mean, one could
> fake it (and we have in the past) but we've got the time - we might as
> well give it another shot this time around ;)
> 

Sorry, but I think I disagree. Simply speaking, marketing just means to
make coherent decisions in the following four areas:

 (1) Price
 (2) Product
 (3) Place (ie. Distribution)
 (4) Promotion (ie, PR, advertising)

This applies to all products, whether

 - the GNOME desktop,
 - the GNOME development platform,  or
 - separate applications.

It also applies to new versions.

Obviously, we can change neither price nor product. That leaves place
and promotion.

We have basically just three options for place: 
 - Having others distribute GNOME or 
 - doing it ourselves or 
 - doing both.

The first option is basically working with Ubuntu and Fedora. We've had
troubles in the past with the second option but this seems to work now,
thanks to Foresight. So we currently do both, although we may be able to
do this slightly different.

That leaves promotion. Making a "launch plan" (ie. place and promotion)
for GNOME3 is no big deal. I've already outlined one possibility here:

 http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2009-April/msg00091.html


Software is one of those products where one gets a lot of promotion for
free just by releasing a new version. One might say, for GNOME and other
Open Source Software, a series of promoted launches basically constitute
the (general) marketing plan.

What we do lack is a way to reach a decision, a few volunteers to do
some of the work and the infrastructure to make this work (effectively).

I'm really wondering what you mean by "marketing plan" if not the above.
Please explain, what sort of things you miss and why you consider them
necessary to make an "effective" GNOME3 launch.


Best regards,
Claus