[Marketing] Marketing Meeting 9/10-Dec - Marketing Focus

[Cameron Shorter]

I hope to make this meeting (I'll be on the bus with a flaky internet, 
so may drop out).

In thinking about marketing, I'm not sure we have a clear message as to 
WHY we are marketing.

In a conventional company this question is clear, they want to make more 
money, which they can do by selling more product, so the marketing focus 
is to convince consumers to buy product.

Closely followed on this question, is HOW are we going to resource the 
marketing? Through funds or volunteer labour. If we are relying on 
volunteer labour, then we need to very clearly describe the vision, and 
make it very compelling, otherwise the volunteers will do something else.

Here are some possible answers:
1. OSGeo wishes to attract sponsor dollars to cover essential running 
costs. In that case, we need to profile sponsors, and then provide 
marketing which is valuable for sponsors. Eg: Having a sponsor's logo on 
the website may drive sales to the sponsor. The sponsor will also be 
likely volunteer to contribute time to developing marketing material for 
OSGeo.

2. OSGeo wishes to promote the OSGeo projects under its umbrella. This 
will result in increased uptake of these projects, which results in 
increased sales of related services (support, code extensions etc). The 
projects will likely provide resources to create marketing material for 
their projects.

Related to this, OSGeo should be creating a specific OSGeo brand. We 
already have a brand name built around "Open Source" and "Geospatial". 
Less emphasised, but very important in the marketplace is "Quality", 
"Reliability", "Integration", "Commercial Support", "Training", 
"Documentation". These are criteria that software purchasers look for, 
and so should be emphasised. There are strong commercial reasons for 
addressing these "Quality" properties of OSGeo and so we should be able 
to find volunteers to address these components for most projects.

This marketing message leads into a comment [1] I made earlier on the 
incubation list:
* That in order to keep up with the market, and ensure that our OSGeo 
projects remain competitive, we should be gradually raising the bar for 
both incubation and incubated projects so that we strengthen the 
"Quality" message in the "OSGeo" story. Most projects are continually 
improving their sales story, and the OSGeo brand should be raised to 
match this.

I suggest that we as the marketing committee should do define exactly 
what we want from each project to incorporate into our marketing material:
Something like:

within 6 months: 1 page flier describing the project
within 12 months: Packaging of project into LiveDVD  or debian, or osgeo4win
within 18 months: Tutorials on how to use core functionality for the project
within 2 years: Tutorials for all functionality
within 3 years: Training material incorporated into tertiary education 
courses / OSGeo reference book



[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/incubator/2009-October/001327.html

Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
> FYI - Marketing Meeting scheduled for this week!
>
> Timing: http://tinyurl.com/yzjbtmu
> Agenda: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Marketing_Meeting_2009.12.10
>
> If you can't make it, please let me know so we don't wait for you :)
>
> Cc'ing Webcom just in case anyone there is also available to share ideas about 
> the website related parts of the agenda, trying to pick up where we left off 
> back in February meeting. I'll still ferry main points back to Webcom of 
> course.
> _______________________________________________
> Marketing mailing list
> Marketing at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
>   


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com