On Wednesday 18 Aug 2010 03:23:11 Jean-Daniel Dodin wrote:

Le 17/08/2010 15:12, Graham Lauder a écrit :

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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 -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant. Ambassador for OpenSUSE Linux on your Desktop INGOTs Assessor Trainer (International Grades in Office Technologies) www.theingots.org.nz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org