Monday, October 4, 2010

Free Marketing

I can't remember the original person who made the quote: "We live in interesting times"

But with the fork of Mandriva to a new Linux distro project called Mageia and then the creation of the Document Foundation to become custodians of OpenOffice.org (or a fork called LibreOffice), the whole FOSS marketing Universe has suddenly become a really exciting place. So I'm going to make some commentary about Marketing in a Free Software world.

The Mageia project has been interesting and the chance to be in at the ground level of a distro creation is as exciting as all get out, at least to me but I dare say to a few others as well on the marketing and Communications team.

Some in the community find our ramblings on the lists a bit much sometimes so I'm going blog about the marketing side as I see it for the forseeable and perhaps Demystify some of the marketing voodoo.


Marketing is not voodoo, or even Magic, it is a science. I know that sometimes professional Devs in corporates often have a low opinion of marketing people if only because they insist on getting someone else's itch scratched so the devs can't work on there own! :)

Marketing guys in corporates are caught in a vise between Sales and Management/Share holders, Sales want the brand profile lifted so they can shift product, Managers are demanding continuing margins and shareholders demand the brand value be maintained and increased.

A small amount of internal marketing is needed for purposes of morale and maintaining a good company self image amongst staff and besides that's considered HR's job.

By contrast in an OSS organisation, there is a considerable amount of internal marketing as Thorsten Lil so rightly pointed out on the Mageia lists, much more so than the above, essentially for the same reasons but with an additional slant: a Marketing team in a new FOSS project also has to "sell" itself. No HR department to help things along, darn it! :)

In the Mageia project we have gathered a team of excellent people together and we have been working away on a few marketing essentials for the Founders. A Core Values statement was done first and we continue on various other elements as we head towards a definitive branding policy.
Vision, Mission and target markets should lead us to a branding policy, a Logo and a Visual Schema.

It is exciting to think that when Mageia really hits the market we will have a full marketing plan with which to bring it to the world, although doing all this out in the open can be a bit annoying, I'm hoping for security by obscurity, so there will at least be a small element of surprise. :)

No comments:

Post a Comment