Hi, I appologise for a long intro about myself, feel free to skip it. Also feel free to skip to the bottom of this long mail to the suggestions.
I have worked with B2B marketing since 1983 when computer graphics sidetracked me from architecture and design that was my original education from https://aho.no/en <https://aho.no/en>. Doing over 2000 corporate presentations and board room presentations I got a lot of experience with corporate decision making. I took an MBA at http://www.bi.edu/ <http://www.bi.edu/> before starting with web development in 1995, but learned close to nothing about B2B marketing there. I got a good update from this guy later, though http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6521&click=sidebar <http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6521&click=sidebar> That was I decided to started using CouchDB after visiting the Cloudant team when they were a startup. I thought CouchDB was fantastic having worked with .asp and mySQL. All my carreer, I have worked with tech people at the client side. Marketing-wise they to the same mistakes over and over again. I don't say this out of disrespect, I respect tech developers, including software devlopers very much. It just doesn't change the fact that they usually don't know much about marketing. The #1 misconception about tech marketing is: Marketing = promotion ("I have made this great thing, not you marketing people push it into the market for me") Marketing is about doing it the other way around. When marketing is introduced in text books it is often described as the third step in the development of mass production The Production concept was about mass production trying to keep up with demand The Sales concept was about creating demand for what already was being produced The Marketing concept starts with customer needs and targets value creation for a specific customer segment. Communications theory and mass media replaced the door-to-door salesmen by putting ideas about companies and products into the head of people instead of coldcalling and hardselling features. Consumer marketing left #1 ad 2 for the 3rd method in the 60's, while most B2B enterprises are still stuck on 2. How could the CouchDB project benefit from applying the marketing concept? The potential is great, the adoption rate not so great. Rather than letting the project be 100% developer driven, I think it would be very beneficial to mix in some marketing and introduce a customer perspective. A book about marketing that everyone in the tech industry love is from 1991, "Crossing the chasm" by Geoffrey Moore. It is a based on ideas that originally came in a book from 1962, "Diffusion of innovations" by Evertt M. Rogers. The main idea is that the hard thing is to get innovations into the main market - satisfy risk-adverse decision makers. When it comes to strategy, we can learn one thing from Michael Porter. The single idea that Porter builds on is that the one with a strategy always wins over the one without a strategy. You have to have to sacrifice something. Why is this so? Because the guy that tries to compete with everyone will have competitors that become better by focusing more narrowly (on cost, value or a customized solution). It is not like you loose to one competitor, you loose to several at the same time, because each of them had a different strategy and they became better than you and shared the market between themselves. They all positioned themselved to be a winner in a given market segment and the one that did not quite know what segment to go for lost in all segments, eventually. My suggestion is to start with defining the market and competition: Define the market for CouchDB 3.0 (by target group and need served) and identify the 2 competitors in that market segment that have the strongest brands. An illustration: Lets imagine that we are on the Apple eCar team and want to position a new highend sportscar that establishes the brand before launching the cheaper models. We identified Porsche and Tesla as the strongest brands in our segment. By identifying the two strongest brands in our market segment we can move on to the challenge of differentiating ourselves towards these 2 brands and secure a market share. It is a triangualtion technique that uses strong brands already positioned in the heads of our target group to position ourselves (again, in the heads of the right people, not e.g. on a feature comparison table). johs
