Over the past year I have read about the lack of PR around ofBiz, and getting
pointy haired bosses to accept something as wild as ofBiz as "best of breed"
rather than "well this is cheaper, so lets do this".
Today in my mail with about 5 or 6 magazines, was a copy of a magazine called
"businessminds"... "Smart Ideas to help run your business".
This thing is a true work of art.
The cover had a glued on outside front page with an engaging picture of a cute
20-30 something woman on her way to her corner office, and the bottom half had a
offer to win a free Dell laptop. The real cover has a pair of conductor hands
with a lead article entitled "On Being a LEADER", and other teasers as if it was
just magazine like Baseline, CIO...
Inside front cover is a two page spread from GM leasing. Page 5 has ad for a
Chevy Pickkup, page 7 has ad from CDW and McAfee, page 9 has PitneyBowes selling
a small business meter with a 60 day free trial and $50 postage, oddly on page
13 PitneyBowes thinks that I should buy my toner cartridges from them. Packet8
had a two page spread on page 18 and 19 on their hosted VOIP solution, and
PitneyBowes had two more ads later on. I mention all of these ads because it
added incredibly to the experience I had as I was reading the articles.
Page 38 and 38 had a section on gadgets called "Rightstuff" with a larger than
life picture of the cool toy of 2007 the AppleiPhone, and other cool stuff. To
even throw me off the scent even more page 40 and 41 is a two page ad for
FileMaker Pro 8.5.
They even had a marketplace section in the back with the 1/4 page ad for one of
those endless lap pools, and the inside back cover has an ad for the United
States Post Office package delivery, and the outside back cover is Dell hawking
laptops.
I read several of the articles, and they were extremely well written and very
valuable to someone like me. What bothered me is this magazine seemed too
perfect. Kind of like some sort of Stepford Wife magazine, so I dug a little
deeper, or rather looked harder at the cover and publisher's page.
Sage Software. Hum. Home of Mas500 ERP, Mas90&200 ERP, who knows how many other
commercial ERP's that they own today. They sent this to me.
My point is that this was executed to perfection. It cost a Gazillion $USD, but
it was done perfectly. I don't know if they embedded some sort of pheromone to
make me like Sage better, or if they did something with hidden images, but after
I got done reading it, I thought, "Hum those people at Sage must know something
about business to come up with a magazine like this."
There was only one advertisement for Sage, and it was an ad that ran across the
bottom of two pages, had a cute woman in the middle of one of those 360 degree
photographs who was "Mangaging everything from payroll to paper cuts. That's
Sage 360."
I wonder if that's going to be a stumbling block for future acceptance of open
source based ERP installations, or is it an opportunity if we move soon. Maybe
it's not the pointy haired boss, but rather how to we reach out to the "pony
tailed boss?" Women really don't think like men. They view relationships
differently than men. They look at visual items in the perspective of seeing
themselves, vs. men looking at visual items as somthing of attainment.
How do we reach out to women? That might be how this project remains effective
and thriving in the next decade.
--
Walter
