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

On Wednesday 18 Aug 2010 05:12:07 Nelson Marques wrote:

On Wed, 2010-08-18 at 01:12 +1200, Graham Lauder wrote:

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On Wednesday 18 Aug 2010 00:13:25 Jean-Daniel Dodin wrote:

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Le 17/08/2010 13:19, Graham Lauder a écrit :

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Right now we are suboptimal on all fronts.

I don't think so

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.

Sry, I'm not aware of those numbers; could you share them in value and volume? Could you present the goals and so we can understand how far we are from it?

Heh, wouldn't that be nice to pluck those numbers out of the ether, unfortunately we can't really, the old open source marketing dilemma. So what one has to do is go by whatever information is at hand and that usually has to be as much anecdotal as anything else.

I do know that at LCA2010, the worlds second largest linux conference, I was the only SUSE guy present, Novell couldn't even muster a presence in the Open Day trade hall, we were outnumbered by the OpenSolaris guys! :(

Every LUG I go to it's all about Ubuntu, openSUSE is viewed as an interesting curiosity. Government departments putting Linux on the desktop are all Ubuntu.

Would I like to put numbers to all this? You bet I would, but without the end user needing to register it's a pointless exercise. What I would like to see is all kernel updates tallied by all the distros, that would probably give us our best guess as to what is being used out there.

I'm not going to enter on the maturity issues, but how do you define quality and once more how can you back up such claim?

Just curious

The project is mature and the software is mature, for most people it just works. Interestingly I just had a client deliver a machine for a problem, still running 11.0, it turns out it just needed the tmp directory cleaning of all the Blender garbage, but it's the first time I've needed to do anything with this machine since I sold it to her. as I said it just works which speaks to the quality.

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A brand to marketing is a promise. All visual identity is part of that promise, but in a way, you have an excellent logo. Unique.... if you place it under a black and white color set you have a unique silhouette, and it's the outcome of a community process.

A re-branding operation can't be based in such vague assumptions and could use some more backup data.

You won't have any disagreement from me on that score, however, I'm not sure, or at least I can't find any history on the lists, that the same rigour was used in the initial branding process.

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Ubuntu logo isn't exactly spectacular. Does openSUSE strive to follow others or strives to take the lead? Do we really care about Ubuntu? From my point of view. I believe Novell investments on GNU/Linux and open source are way different from Canonical and target different segments. Should we actually be looking into what someone who targets a very different segment does? Are our targeted segments similiar? I would risk to say, "no way jose".

Fair comment, but now whose making vague assumptions? :) I would suggest that Ubuntu is a competitor for the Desktop Linux market. Do we care about it? Probably, because competitor analysis is a part of any good marketing strategy. Should we, of course, is another question.

My personal feeling is that we should consider MS our main competitor because the likelihood is that we will be taking from their Desktop market.

I would be more interested in targeting relatively new users, young new users who haven't been indoctrinated and who aren't yet set in their ways. In general I have the greatest success with this demographic, they are more open to change and they adjust to the environment far quicker and far easier. In my experience they then "infect" their parents and family around them.

This is a simple factor of the market, the critical thing that we lack (and this true of most Linux distros although Ubuntu is getting over this better than most) is community support networks and I don't mean maillists forums and so forth, I mean within a users local community, the next door neighbour, the nephew or uncle or schools and polytechsl. Windows has this which is a major factor in why they are so difficult to displace.

Ubuntu has targeted this market well, it's marketing speaks to this demographic. I attend Linux and open source events an conferences all the time Invariably I'm invited as the OOo marketing guy and rarely as an openSUSE guy, but what is very noticeable is the vast majority of the Ubuntu guys are under 25.

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viewer feel good and excited. Green, does none of these things, green is a calming colour but doesn't immediately attract attention.

on our ecological days, green is the best possible coolor, including political groups uses this color!

Not denying and if I was marketing an ecological organisation I would suggest green and in fact have.

Ok then, define for me if you will the target demographic that this branding and style was aimed at.

My personal view; Novell is a company which has social responsibility, in many ways, even a project like openSUSE has social responsability. Keeping an ecological bond somewhere would be nice... Now about the green what does Marketing sees in it (backed up by academical studies based on what human beings perceive from colours, valid for western world):

Green: Positive Associations: nature, vegetable, spring, life, hope, fertility, security, satisfaction, rest Green turquoise is considered icy, aggressive and violent. Negative Associations: Green turquoise is considered icy, aggressive and violent.

So from my scope, green is nice... Most of those associations can be benefic in several fields, from social responsibility to engineering.

You should consider colors for what people perceive from them and associate them with, specially your targeted audiences.

I already did that as you should have picked up from the original mail, that particular field I have studied in depth

I would suggest that to the green you add some line of 'silver'. Why? Because since ancient times that a enamel should be complemented with a metal. Silver can provide it with green. Silver has no negative associations and provides the following: Positive Associations: Modern, Technology, Innovation.

Agreed, as I pointed out to gnokii, good colour mix for landrover and if your target market is 35 to 60 year old males..... which unsurprisingly probably covers most of the openSUSE developer community. :)

This would be a possible proposal to keep it simple, not torn down a community driven process in the past.

I never said anything about tearing down anything. You're putting words in my mouth, what I'm saying is: Brand to your target market

This has nothing to do with Ubuntu or Canonical does, our concerns should be about what OUR community wants us to be, and specially how we want to present ourselfs to the community.

Like I said the marketing has been aimed internally and will therefore tend to make the project in their own favourite image. That happens and while trying to expand a dev pool it was probably the best brand in the beginning

About Ubuntu logo, test it, black and white, 150 feet distance and ask a battalion of ubuntu fanboys without any debrief on the goals if they recognize the silhouette of their logo. I would speculate about a massive fail and that would translate how good their logo is... same method on ours... probably would have better results.

That's not really relevant to the discussion, we are not erecting arches

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Changing brand is always extremely dangerous

Not dangerous, scary, it's an entirely different thing. If a brand isn't working then change it. 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.

Scary? If you excluse re-positioning a product, re-branding is the most dangerous process in Marketing and it can sink companies. A re-branding process can take years, banks usually take 2/3 years for this process...

What arrant nonsense. There could possibly be a "danger" if we were talking about affecting sales income, nobody is going to loose a limb or their life. The company is not about to go broke because they don't have to give away so many DVD's. You are typically thinking from a old school corporate mindset. We are not a bank, we are not a low margin, high turnover retailer. We are an open source community enthusiastic about freely sharing our favourite project with the world. What we have to do is get people excited about it so that they are keen to take us up on the offer.

I dont believe re-branding is a solution... neither it should be applied to openSUSE.

This is the forum for offering alternatives, which I see you have done! Well done, great idea.

It is perhaps worth adding here, the 11.3 DVDs arrived on the courier today, somebody in open-slx has already taken a shot, funky packaging, more attractive green and exciting graphics. Oh yeah I could sell this. Looking forward to getting some retail boxes!

Cheers GL