I've always preferred the functional view of marketing: Lead Generation.
After getting someone's attention, and getting them to ask for more
information, then we're talking sales.
Miles Fidelman
Johs Ensby wrote:
Jan,
Hi PMC,
I would like to share my two favourite definitions of marketing.
1) the externally oriented:
Create value and extract a fair share of it
Even if it is the Harvard Business School definition and points at monetary
reward proportionate to the (much bigger) value created for customers (users),
I think it applies. CouchDB developers create value for users, for which they
are rewarded in more than economical ways. Reward is in the end proportionate
to the value created for external parties.
2) the internally oriented:
Align resources to meed customer needs
This is why it is so important to have target groups and distribution channels
in mind. CouchDB has more than one target group, reducing it to the core
developers themselves in a “I do what inspires me” is of course the extreme,
but even reducing the target group to developers with a specific skill set is a
dramatic choice, as is reducing the target group to developers at large, since
they are often not the most influential decision makers in the selection of
technology. When a developer suggests a technology to a customer or a
management team they will be looking at the challenge of recruiting people as
one of their first concerns.
Imagine the developer who says CouchDB seems like the most promising NoSql
option, and his non-developer peers do this:
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=couchdb%2C%20redis%2C%20mongodb&date=1%2F2009%2073m&cmpt=q&tz=
<https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=couchdb, redis, mongodb&date=1/2009
73m&cmpt=q&tz=>
Wouldn’t it be nice if a million young developers were playing with the
technology in a way that recruited another million and those two millions
recruited another two millions and….
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=couchdb%2C%20couch%20app%2C%20react.js%2C%20angular.js&date=1%2F2009%2073m&cmpt=q&tz=
<https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=couchdb, couch app, react.js, angular.js&date=1/2009
73m&cmpt=q&tz=>
What would it take?
You are spot-on re Couch apps here, Jan :
On 11 May 2015, at 18:53, Jan Lehnardt <[email protected]> wrote:
FWIW, I don’t think there’d be massive changes, just some rearrangements and
some additions and some cuts and mostly story telling on our various media
outlets.
What is stopping us right now, is a misconception of what marketing actually is.
Marketing is much more than promotion -- like language is much more than
speaking French or writing in C. It is fundamentally about 2-way communication
with the audience you choose.
I am not looking for a Wozniak/Jobs or Straubel/Musk kind of balance between
the developer and marketing discipline.
Jan, your “can play a role” through “figuring out the story” is more than
enough for me, but I don’t see the point in contributing if the PMC keeps up
the policing against discussions about features.
marketing@ can play a role in defining the features of CouchDB through
the figuring out the story of CouchDB.
The best part of your take on this is that it is not a one-way street from
communicators to developers or vice versa, which seems to be where the present
misconception is rooted. There needs to be certain portion of mutual respect
between at least those two disciplines for marketing to happen. Defining
features and figuring out the story is an iterative, dialogue-based process,
where starting in one end is not better than starting in the other.
Johs
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
