In which Matthew goes to Training (and comes back with Ideas about Marketing)

[Gabriele Trombini]

Il giorno mer, 21/10/2015 alle 10.12 -0400, Matthew Miller ha scritto:

[cut]
> 
> 
> A Model of Marketing
> --------------------
> 
> 
>     Finding          Defining    /----------\   Marketing Plan
>     User Problems    Our Market  |Conceptual|  
>                                  \-----v----/      Getting New Users
>     Identify       Product             | 
>      Strengths      Portfolio          |  User       Keeping Existing
> Users
>                                        | Personas 
>     "Why/why not           Business    |       
>         Fedora?"            Plan       |      Measuring Program
>     /---------\                        |        Effectiveness    /---
> -----\
>     |Strategic >-----------------------+------------------------<
> Tactical|
>     \---------/           Requirements |  Finding References     \---
> -----/
>                  Product               |  & Testimonials  
>     Assess        Roadmap   Use Cases  |                   Collateral
>      Competition                       |   Finding Leads
>                             Project    |                  "Sales"  
>  Events
>     Assess Our     Here       Status   |     Launch Plan  Training
>      Own Tech  Is Literally A     /----^----\                       
>  Demos
>                 Box That Just     |Technical| Show Leadership       
>                 Says Innovation   \---------/  Through Blogs &
> Speaking
> 
> 
> Punchline
> ---------
> 
> The core takeaway — and, basically, this is Spoiler Alert for the
> training — is that the essential activity of Marketing is _finding
> problems in the market_ and helping the organization create and
> distribute solutions to them.
> 

That's fair; but in order to have a market strategy we should track our
"sales" (not really sales of course). 
That's impossible to get, we are not able to handle what happen *after*
the release download.
Maybe Country communities can give us a feedback about the issues
people are facing. Only in that way we can have a sort of realistic
feedback; we might consider also people installing Fedora without any
request to the community.


> 
> Current Fedora Marketing
> ------------------------
> 
> I think it's fair to say that right now, Fedora Marketing, together
> with
> Fedora Ambassadors, is very focused on the bottom right quadrant.
> More
> technical, more tactical. Specifically, we work on trumpeting new
> releases and the launch plan (Go/No-Go meeting), we work on
> collateral
> (brochures, websites, swag), we do events. And, Marketing/CommOps is
> planning to do demo material and provide better event support for
> Ambassadors.
> 
> And the Magazine fits pretty nicely here, too — there's a whole
> category
> basically about demonstrating your organization's leadership in an
> area,
> and that's blogs and press outreach and speaking at conferences and
> social media and so on.

I agree. Marketing usually is a top level business sector. It doesn't
have any contact with "customers" (as said before, not real customers);
the marketing team studies long term strategies, explores statistics,
choose metrics, checks concurrency. Its job is closely related to the
leaders strategies.
Ambassadors are the front-office for the users and they should
give/receive inputs from/to mktg.

Is my opinion that magazine is a tool to give voice to our community.
I'm not sure technical articles are interesting for the whole Fedora
world. I think we should reach all the people with a magazine that
spreads the Fedora world from the inside.
People are more interested to listen stories than a technical article.
I'm not discussing about the quality of the two things, but we have to
consider also people that are approaching this world and want to know
inside movements.  

Maybe a solution could be handle two magazines, with different target:

1) technical magazine;
2) generic magazine.

Really unworkable.


> However...
> ----------
> 
> As noted above, Marketing and Ambassadors are really focused on the
> "below the line" activites on the right side. That leaves a big weak
> area
> in the more conceptual but action-oriented side. This is a big hole,
> and
> it seems like improving this could make a difference.

As said before, my opinion is to move marketing at a top level.
> 
> 
> But, Bigger Picture Problem!
> ----------------------------
> 
> Refer back up to the punchline, and notice something I left out —
> identifying user problems that we want to target. This is something
> we
> did in very broad strokes with the three editions, but which we
> aren't so
> great at doing continually.

So the question is, how we can get statistics? Statistics are the
solution worldwide for getting strategies.
I know the Project is full of people really qualified to have an
opinion where/when we are going, but only an answer from the market can
tell us if it's really happening.


> 
> I'm working on the Fedora 23 release annoucement right now, and this
> really hit home. Rather than going out, finding things our users are
> having trouble with, and coming back with "There! We fixed it for
> you!",
> we're working on "The widget set number has been incremented. There
> are
> fewer bugs in most of the things, while others have new bugs. Some of
> the
> parts have been moved to better places."

Yes that's the announcement, the one page release notes mean IMO; and
the ambassadors should take note of these notes.


> 
[cut]
> Call for Help
> -------------
> 
> At Flock this year, Joe Brockmeier suggested that Improved Marketing
> might make a good 12-18 month Fedora Objective. I've been reflecting
> on
> that for a while, and, given the kick from the above, I'm thinking
> that
> it's a good idea. But, going back to my first line here, it'd be most
> awesome if we had the objective captained by someone with an actual
> background in this area. Someone for whom all of this is _obvious
> 101-level stuff_, not new material. Maybe that's already someone
> here.
> Maybe it's someone you know. What do you think?


Of course I agree with Joe.
Be careful that a good seller might be a terrible marketing man.
Marketing strategies are so closely similar to budgeting. In order to
have a good budget a company must assume a target, choose the tools to
reach them and evaluate in currency terms; likewise marketing must
assume a target, choosing the tools to reach them and evaluate in time
terms.

Of course the issue is more complicated of what I said, but you put on
the table a good point.

This is only my opinion.

Thans

Gabri (mailga)