On Monday 03 Dec 2012 10:25:22 Rob Weir wrote: > I saw a question on this list a week or so ago, along the lines of > "Why does a good, free product need to marketed?". This is a good > question. I hope I have a good answer. > > I'd start by invoking the "awareness ladder". Some of you are > probably familiar with it. You look at your prospective "customers" > and put them in one of the following buckets:
Marketing an Open Source product is always about "Brand Awareness", certainly it is true for OOo. Our goal is always about Brand awareness, that's why I was so pissed about losing the name. It may have been seemingly clumsy although the new one is arguably clumsier, but it was ours, it was unique and it was recognisable in it's most visible form: Text > > 1) Unaware -- does not know about your product or even the problem it solves Brand awareness solves the former, the latter is education > > 2) Problem aware -- knows about the problem, but not that there are > solutions, or that your product is a solution This is a biggy, but is more at the advertising end than marketing: Our opposition has managed to convince the customer that some big problems that OOo solves are not really problems at all, just a cost of doing business. The biggies are purchase cost, license management and upgrade cost. > > 3) Solution aware -- knows that there are solutions, but does not know > about your solution Brand awareness > > 4) Product aware -- knows about your product Which is where need to get to and what our marketing focus should be on. > > 5) Fully aware -- is using your product, recommending it to others, etc. Which is where we want to be, but getting from 4 to 5 is sales. We should (and do) provide collateral for people at the sharp end to use. [....] > > Note that the competitive "my product is better than your product" is > mainly at levels 4 and 5. Until then you are not so much selling a > product, but selling an idea, the idea that there is a problem that > has solutions. > > So what does this mean for open source like Apache OpenOffice? What > problem are we solving? I've sketched out some possibilities on the > wiki here: > > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Why+OpenOffice > > Most of them are variations on "I need an office suite for X but I > don't want to pay for Microsoft Office". Some people know that have > that problem and are looking for a solution. (They are "problem > aware"). But others don't even know there is something like a free > office suite. Others know there is a problem and that there are > alternative solutions and want to know what the advantages of Apache > OpenOffice are. > > So even with free, open source software, there is still need for > marketing, especially with the earlier steps on the awareness ladder. > > We might think that OpenOffice is one of the most prominent open > source brands around -- and indeed it is. But I recently commissioned > a brand awareness survey of US internet users and only 24% of them had > heard of the OpenOffice brand. You did? Cool. Actually that's quite a bit higher than I thought would have been the case for a "US only" demographic which actually has a very low user base in proportion to population, I'd call that a positive result > So beyond the relatively small circle > of open source enthusiasts, we're still unknown. In Europe the numbers would be considerably higher. > Of course, this is a > huge opportunity for growth. > This is gold, are we able to access more info about the survey? > So yes, OpenOffice needs marketing, even though it is free. But the > emphasis probably should focus on enlarging the universe of potential > users who are aware of this product category and of that OpenOffice is > the premier solution within that category. In a sense we're the > ambassadors of open source to the wider consumer market, the first > open source product that many users learn about. Firefox is of course the most commonly used user space OSS product but I'd be interested to know what proportion of those users associate it with Open Source, or even know what "Open Source" is. In the old "Must, Should, Could" knowledge divisors it's always been my opinion that the fact that it is Open Source is in the "Should Know" category. The question is around the marketing value of the term Open Source. Will the Open Source message increase brand awareness? There is good argument to be made that it is more likely that someone being aware of the term OpenSource would be aware of OOo so therefore there is little need to push the Open Source message. However, having said that, corporate clients specifically looking for Open Source solutions to solve licensing problems could see that as an attractor, especially under an Apache license. One group that we should be marketing to are the small to medium software development and support businesses. "Build your own Office suite and package, sell and support it!" One advantage of this group is there is likely a higher awareness of the brand already and could also be a a source of dev recruitment. Some proposals in this direction would be excellent. Thanks for this Rob, good stuff. Cheers GL > > Regards, > > -Rob
