Hi everyone,
This mail is a seed of discussion, from marketing professional. My fellow, Shinji Enoki, had met Mr. Chris Kruppa in the event "Agile tour Osaka" in Japan. Chris is a marketing specialist, and a LibreOffice user (great!). He gave us a very worth advice for us about our branding and marketing from his professional point of view. We, Japanese community want to share it all of you, and Chris allowed. Chris: Thanks! Please remind: Chris doesn't feed the list, so if you want tell some to Chris, please CC him (his address is in the mail). His advice is pasted as follows: ----------- Please see some feedback below for improving the brand. In general I can say, that Libre Office liberately oushes itself into a niche market, where it in my opinion doesn't need to be. This is a strategic decision, but I believe, but MS Office is not superior to Libre Office and therefore Libre Office can be also advertised to the mass market: - You can see this on the start page of Libre Office - Why do you say "...the community has waited." Everybody has waited for. Please consider, each pc or mac or linux user in the world needs an Office Suite. Libre Office is cheaper than MS Office, but offers nearly same functionality. Still it is only in the community. Maybe, there is a reason, but I would encourage users from all over. - I have seen on several occasions, that it is still called the Libre Office Project. Why? Libre Office just released version 4. This is a mature project and can be used without flaws. I would remove the project. "Project" sounds unfinished, not done yet, we are working on that, etc. - As you are trying to offer Libre Office for download and ask for developers on the same website, I believe, the community aspect is pretty strong for many visitors. And community aspect might give the impression to people, it is sloppy and not a good quality. Same as wikipedia: It is not really 100% accepted, because everybody can change it. That there is still a wonderful quality assurance system behind: Nobody sees. Libre Office might give in it's current form, the same impression. Why not separate the download of the stable version from the developer community. - Focus on two or three more strengths of LO over MSO besides being free - for example, you have a portable version. Isn't that great? How about setting the goal to build the first usable mobile word processor? Etc. Focus on features more, than on community and free aspect. - I do not know about your goals and your current numbers, so it is a bit hard to give more ideas, but I hope the above gives yo an idea. Maybe you could partner up with universities and schools, Android and MacOSX to promote it further. But maybe there are efforts as this already. Ok, that's it for the moment, would that help you? Was it, what you were looking for? I am happy to give a presentation (via skype) in front of some people, if you want - but I would need to know more about your goals, your vision and current strategy. Thanks, Chris -- Naruhiko Ogasawara ([email protected]) -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
