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

[Cameron Shorter]

Frank,
some good comments from you below, in particular in attracting marketing 
contributions from projects (by offering to push the marketing through 
OSGeo marketing channels like conferences). This is much better than 
mandating through incubation criteria.

I do think we should be looking at promoting the "Quality" in OSGeo and 
institutionalising this in the incubation process, but I'll leave that 
for someone else to follow, or will wait until I have the capacity to 
follow through on the work required to support the process.

For the moment, I'll focus on marketing through helping create the next 
version of the LiveDVD, and hopefully also include project fliers as 
part of this. (I'll be looking for help to make the fliers work).

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Cameron Shorter wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Cameron,
>
> In my opinion the primary reason we are marketing (I prefer the world
> promotion) is (2) - to increase the uptake of OSGeo projects (and
> non OSGeo open source geospatial projects), primarily in the hopes that
> it will drive additional contribution in various ways.  That is the
> key part of OSGeo mission.
>
> I believe we should assume that sponsors are primarily supporting
> us because they want open source geospatial projects to be successful
> and grow.
>
> I think promoting our sponsors should be relatively incidental,
> though some effort should go into it where reasonable.
>
>> 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 think we need to discuss quite widely whether we want OSGeo to
> require and drive a higher level of quality in our projects before
> we go to town promoting OSGeo as a quality brand.  This is something
> that will require fairly wide consensus in the community if it is going
> to be a substantial push.  I must admit the idea of OSGeo hounding me
> (as a GDAL or MapServer developer) to meet it's quality standards rankles
> at first.
>
>> 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
>
> I think the marketing committee could explain that it wants to promote
> OSGeo as a "quality" brand, and that the above would be very helpful
> as steps towards that.  But you need to avoid the impression that
> the marketing committee sees itself as the pinnacle of command and
> control, telling everyone what to do so that marketing can be more
> effective and unified.
>
> Certainly it is reasonable to ask that all projects cooperate in
> preparation and maintenance of a one page flier.
>
> I think it is reasonable to point out that the marketting committee
> will be promoting some particular packaging solutions (perhaps the 
> LiveDVD,
> OSGeo4W, DebianGIS, etc) and that projects are encouraged to participate
> in order to benefit from the marketing effort.
>
> I think we can stress that tutorials and training materials are valuable.
>
> But we need to be cautious about setting deadlines and setting priorities
> for volunteer projects.
>
> Best regards,


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

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