Le 17/08/2010 15:12, Graham Lauder a écrit :
Our market penetration is below what it should be considering the corporate backing we have, the maturity of the project and the quality of the product.
it's the result of history, and on this brand have little to do.
Understand me: I don't say we don't have to make our logo/branding better! But It looks like you didn't follow all the SuSE history :-). The lizard was changed many times, and once we changed even the green to take blue. This was not a good choice and we come back to green. Let alone because most other colors are already used by others distros.
From a visual impact point of view and from a style point of view it is not good, we like it because it's familiar. Familiarity however, breeds complacency.
and who say so? You. I don't. where is the market study, the value engineering study (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_engineering)?
It is in fact well known compared to ours, if only because of the warm fuzzy story behind it
I have an ubuntu official cd right in front of myself, and I don't see where is there a brand! 10.04 written in big dots, and dots all under (http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:wwd-6EJXzj8whM:http://aleex.fr/wp-content... - http://api.ning.com/files/VE6O*Ddc5Bo8J-6M-MjhO*XyiN1O1nm87khUrW1UYSYp1sfKX7...)
Ok then, define for me if you will the target demographic that this branding and style was aimed at.
YES. This we have to do (see the strategy discussion). And YES, I think green is today the real target: people world future aware are much closer of the open source spirit than most others
Not dangerous, scary, it's an entirely different thing. If a brand isn't working then change it.
did you notice McDonald changed red to green :-)))
Find the demographic of the target market and design
to suit. It doesn't actually mean that we need to abandon the old branding. Changing the branding is only problematic if it's done badly and really speaking there was no real plan around our present branding, it was done to make the project feel good about itself, in other words it was aimed internally.
yes, as somebody else said, we have to build a marketing team, fine tune the branding and promote it.
Don't forget openSUSE had first to battle to build a distro (the move to Novell was not that easy), a wiki, mailing lists, forums, localized sites, a community.
And now we can go ahead and speak about brand.
So thanks opening this discussion!
jdd