On Sun, 10 Jul 2005 18:50:16 +1200 John Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-07-09 at 22:25 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote: > > > So, let's decide who our customers are (home users, corporates, > > > distros, ISVs IIRC) and then test our branding materials on some > > > of them, and see what they think. > > > > Our customers are all these people, but it looks like we want to > > target a few of them specifically: > > http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam_2fTargetMarkets > > (surely we want fewer primary targets?) > > It depends. The accepted wisdom in marketing is to target the > smallest number of market segments necessary in order to achieve > well-defined goals. A core problem of the 'target market' page is that these elements are no proper segments but structural elements. This is like shooting an arrow on a large field, and then to say you hit. Examples: a) Which individual (end) users? Multimedia fans, designers, office workers? Young, old? etc. b) Which enterprises? Automobile, high-tech, medizine, etc? Small ones or big ones? c) Which public sectors? Top, middle or low government? Special areas of governments, such as Administrative Workflow and Workload management, Communication and management of public sector documents, eLearning, Human resource and career development, Hospital management and healthcare, Real estate management and Geoinformation, or Security, encryption, PKI, identification and authentication? Any geographical segments? Europe, South america, asia, etc? I think, c) points on a very interesting aspect: If we'd pick a real segment here (maybe based on proper research results), how do we proceed? We might send them a few letters, saying 'GNOME's great' but then? This points to another core problem: The real utility of a desktop enviroment lies is its market share. It enables one to change workstadions without the need for re-training. In relation to that, decision makers (individuals or organizations) only care about content and the means to process that content. Thus, applications are our potential means to differentiate. Since the best opportunity to influence application developement are FOSS ISV's, what leverage do we have here? Cheers, Claus -- marketing-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
