On Wednesday 18 Aug 2010 03:23:11 Jean-Daniel Dodin wrote:
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.
I agree that history and some outside factors, that we are all well aware of, have impacted on our mindshare within the Linux community, but I am wondering if our whole marketing effort has been misdirected, trying to take a slice of a one percent market when we should be going after a share of the 99%
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.
Ooh god, I remember the blue, Thank heavens that didn't last long. I also remember some pretty good efforts on behalf of our corporate partner. The NLD9 campaign was a pretty good effort, I could never understand why they abandoned that for the Enterprise version. It had impact, good visual identity, good strong message and oozed sophistication and reliability. The washed out green of the SLE10 campaign was a backward step IMNSHO.
The point is I do have a bit of a handle on the history and I would have liked to participate earlier but circumstances didn't really allow, so the frustration has built over time. I have been out there at the coal face and I get frustrated when I attend conferences or events and I'm a single face in the crowd of Ubuntu guys
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)?
First don't get me wrong, I actually like the visual matrix since 11.0. The DVDs are visually excellent, although I'm not so down with the latest retail box. The Grey and Green pallet oozes solidity, dependability, sophistication. Excellent for a corporate market.
Me, I'm a fan of Geeko, I managed to score a few of the magnet toy Geekos. Gad!! I would love a few thousand of those. I would package them with the retail box. Imagine them on the shop shelves, huge point of difference. Good fun image, it would be wicked and I could get them on shelves of the big chainstores in a heartbeat right in MS's face, but again that's point of sale stuff and not what we're talking about here.
I've already stated that we need to do the basic ground work. Define our target market and brand accordingly
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-conte nt/uploads/2010/05/2010-05-22-15.31.43.jpg - http://api.ning.com/files/VE6O*Ddc5Bo8J-6M-MjhO*XyiN1O1nm87khUrW1UYSYp1sfKX 7-wKe3s45F7AMUgC1WD8qEmGitnAno5R4DIsTJSAQ0rvUrU/CDUbuntu10.04.LTS.300pin.jp g?width=139&height=136)
The CD is not about marketing image, that's about sales, which is a different beast altogether and frankly I don't think that we're that badly off right now in that area.
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 :-)))
The Golden Arches are still there and the green I think is probably a local thing because it's certainly red and gold here. Also I think that in parts of Europe I would say green is probably good for that demographic
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.
Amen to that
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.
I can relate to that, I shared an office with the Novell guys here and watched it disassemble around me and in that office was one of the lead developers of the original openSUSE.
And now we can go ahead and speak about brand.
So thanks opening this discussion!
Thank you for taking part.
jdd
Cheers GL
On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 2:51 AM, Graham Lauder graham@theingots.org.nz wrote:
On Wednesday 18 Aug 2010 03:23:11 Jean-Daniel Dodin wrote:
Le 17/08/2010 15:12, Graham Lauder a écrit :
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.
Ooh god, I remember the blue, Thank heavens that didn't last long. I also remember some pretty good efforts on behalf of our corporate partner. The NLD9 campaign was a pretty good effort, I could never understand why they abandoned that for the Enterprise version. It had impact, good visual identity, good strong message and oozed sophistication and reliability. The washed out green of the SLE10 campaign was a backward step IMNSHO.
According to "Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities: A case study of Novell and the openSUSE project", the Novell Linux Desktop was dropped because the SUSE brand was better.
"Novell’s first launch of Linux was branded as “Novell Linux Desktop 9”, and was marketed across the world in Novell’s red company colors. According to former SUSE employees, it was a mistake to drop the pre-existing SUSE brand name in the first release: “It was red, all the branding was gone, and we were furious! (...) But then at some point somebody had noticed that SUSE Linux was a very very strong brand.” (interview #23) According to this engineer from the former SUSE company, it seemed as if Novell had underestimated the strength of the SUSE name among the existing customer base and open source community, and therefore chose to keep the SUSE name in its future Linux releases. The next (and current) enterprise release was named “SUSE Linux Enterprise”."
(p. 58)
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Community_references
The point is I do have a bit of a handle on the history and I would have liked to participate earlier but circumstances didn't really allow, so the frustration has built over time. I have been out there at the coal face and I get frustrated when I attend conferences or events and I'm a single face in the crowd of Ubuntu guys
[...]
I've already stated that we need to do the basic ground work. Define our target market and brand accordingly
The market target definition is on-going work with the Strategy discussion, although I'm pretty sure the openSUSE Project won't target the same market as Ubuntu. The green color and chamelon logo of the openSUSE brand is already defined and well established. Changing it would be a major mistake. And it is probably far better than what you expect.
Regards,
R.
/Save the Planet. Use openSUSE.
On Thursday 19 Aug 2010 00:48:28 Rémy Marquis wrote:
On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 2:51 AM, Graham Lauder graham@theingots.org.nz
wrote:
On Wednesday 18 Aug 2010 03:23:11 Jean-Daniel Dodin wrote:
Le 17/08/2010 15:12, Graham Lauder a écrit :
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.
Ooh god, I remember the blue, Thank heavens that didn't last long. I also remember some pretty good efforts on behalf of our corporate partner. The NLD9 campaign was a pretty good effort, I could never understand why they abandoned that for the Enterprise version. It had impact, good visual identity, good strong message and oozed sophistication and reliability. The washed out green of the SLE10 campaign was a backward step IMNSHO.
Hi Remy, Thanks for contributing to the discussion
According to "Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities: A case study of Novell and the openSUSE project", the Novell Linux Desktop was dropped because the SUSE brand was better.
Actually you read into Mr Stoveland's thesis what is patently not there. It says nothing about the brand being better, what it says out front and even more loudly in subtext is that Novell buckled to the objections of staff of the old SuSE company.
Not surprisingly, it was a huge change for SuSE staffers, in terms of ownership, in terms of development model. Here was a foreign company jumping in and screwing with their baby, that was going to cause difficulties. In that time of violent upheaval, adding more upheaval was always going to be problematic. There may have been objections from some customers and that is also understandable, but at the end of the day, the decision to drop the NLD branding was about keeping the peace internally at SuSE.
Frankly me I would have retained the SuSE brand for Europe including the pallet and used the Novell branding in the US and elsewhere, car and truck manufacturers do it all the time, brand & label to the market. I believe by not changing it, they shot themselves in the foot in the rest of the world. Why; because now there is a no common branding between Netware and SUSE Linux. This is a problem. Outside Europe, in Novell's preferred corporate and institutional demographic, SuSE was unknown and Netware was a well known brand. The NLD9 campaign was a good campaign it pointed in the direction Novell needed to go: Linux as a seamless replacement for Netware and expanding that global brand out to the consumer desktop, however for such a campaign to work there had to be ownership at the coalface and they didn't quite get that right. Sometimes it is just as important to market a concept internally to get staff to take ownership of that concept.
As Mr Stoveland's thesis reveals, this goal was scuttled by a combination of parochialism at SuSE and a lack of real understanding of the Open Source model at Novell headquarters. After all they were still feeling their way and would never have come up against the rabid passion that most OSS people feel for their favourite project. :)
At that time Novell needed to grow some backbone but they were still floundering about on a whole new learning curve. They needed to retain SuSE staffers because they had no Linux culture in the rest of the company and the SuSE staffers probably were wondering if they wanted to work for this company when their loyalty was to SuSE, not NLD.
It's probably in the Sun Tzu's "the Art of War" somewhere, but you think carefully about choosing a fight with someone who has nothing to lose. You had a combination of people who cared more about "their" brand than their jobs and a community of volunteers whose ownership of the brand goes way beyond dollars and cents! :) Novell, unsure of it's situation, took the path of least resistance.
So Novell backed right off the NLD branding, too far imo. Of course, that this was a mistake is just my opinion, but it's an opinion backed by over fifteen years as CEO/MD of my own companies (rtd in 2003) and being on the outside looking in from a dispassionate viewpoint. It's always hard to see things clearly when you're looking from the inside.
In any corporate acquisition, there is a hearts and minds component It was obviously more important for Novell at that juncture to look after the development staff at SuSE than pursuing a new branding strategy.
Cheers GL
"Novell’s first launch of Linux was branded as “Novell Linux Desktop 9”, and was marketed across the world in Novell’s red company colors. According to former SUSE employees, it was a mistake to drop the pre-existing SUSE brand name in the first release: “It was red, all the branding was gone, and we were furious! (...) But then at some point somebody had noticed that SUSE Linux was a very very strong brand.” (interview #23) According to this engineer from the former SUSE company, it seemed as if Novell had underestimated the strength of the SUSE name among the existing customer base and open source community, and therefore chose to keep the SUSE name in its future Linux releases. The next (and current) enterprise release was named “SUSE Linux Enterprise”."
(p. 58)
Regards,
R.
/Save the Planet. Use openSUSE.
-
Graham Lauder -
Rémy Marquis