I will be presenting at Webinale in Karlsruhe, Germany. My talk is entitled Marketing von Open-Source-Software and will take place May 28th, 15:20-16:20. Let me know if you are around at that day and I’d be happy to meet with you.
Without understanding the target audience, Open Source businesses will not be able to effectively communicate with those who are supposed to buy their products, support, services and contribute to software development.
Ideally, the target audience has been defined in the corporate marketing strategy. Although this might seem obvious, most of the Open Source companies we work with at InitMarketing have a rather vague idea about whom they want to talk and sell to. The following reasons are typical:
The Branding and Positioning page in my Wiki provides some ideas how to address the needs of your target audience - but how to understand them? Will you have to pay expensive market analysis programs? No, you don’t, because informed intuition comes to the rescue plus the fact that Open Source allows for incremental marketing.
Geoffrey A. Moore defines informed intuition in his classic marketing book Crossing the Chasm:
The key is to understand how intuition - specifically, informed intuition - actually works. Unlike numerical analysis, it does not rely on processing a statistically significant sample of data in order to achieve a given level of confidence. Rather, it involves conclusions based on isolating a few high-quality images - really, data fragments - that it takes to be archetypes of a broader and more complex reality. […] so in marketing can whole target-customer populations become imagined as teenyboppers, yuppies, pickups and gun racks. These are all just images - stand-ins for a greater reality - picked out from a much larger set of candidate images on the grounds that they really “click” with the sum total of an informed person’s experience.
In his book, Moore further describes how to define sample scenarios that allow to understand the user, technical buyer and economic buyer. In essence, the definition of a target audience should be able to answer this little question: Why does your product matter?
Given that many of today’s successful Open Source businesses are alternatives to closed source competitors (e.g. Linux vs. Microsoft, MySQL vs. Oracle), it is quite easy for them to imagine their target audience. Such Open Source products are being used by developers, hence it is mostly developers developing for developers. To define a target audience, such companies basically just need to look at themselves.
The higher Open Source moves up the stack, the more important it becomes for Open Source software vendors and their partner companies to focus on end user needs, a target audience very different from how software programmers think. One example would be SugarCRM who successfully communicate to sales and marketing personnel across various industries.
Due to the Open Source development mantra release early, release often, companies can adjust their understanding of the target audience gradually at minimum risk, but only if they also follow the mantra of incremental marketing: communicate often, communicate early. They will automagically learn to understand their target audience as long as they make sure that they allow for interactive external communication for example through an online forum on their website and establish good internal communication within their organization between the development, marketing and sales teams.
The combination of informed intuition and incremental marketing forms a general business advantage for Open Source companies, because it allows them to minimize the risk of being guided by prejudices when it comes to understanding the target audience.
There is no need to spend a fortune in marketing dollars to launch a new Open Source product. You can create substantial buzz with a low marketing budget to win your first customers.
The basic rules are:
The good thing about Open Source software is that there is nothing to hide. You can inform the public and let it participate in your project from the second you had the idea of building it. The openness of the Open Source development model allows low budget micro-marketing on the internet to build an ecosystem with emerging sales leads even before the product is ready for production use.
The benefits of launching a product the Open Source Marketing way are:
Here are some sample marketing actions, applicable on different stages of the product development life cycle:
) who help you to create some buzz in the blogosphere. Set up an invitation-only online demo which will allow you to collect some more leads. Include a screencast on the product website that explains what your software does and what it’s good for.Once you have reached the beta release milestone, you might want to employ a marketing expert or outsource some marketing work to an agency. After the beta release you might start to charge for support, especially installation and configuration to companies who can afford that - make sure that you still help out those with related questions on the forum for free.
Additionally some early adopters might consider using your software in production based on their good impression of the beta release and once the stable version is out. These potential customers share your vision of the product and see the same business benefits as you do. They might pay you for standby support , consulting, customizing.
Inexpensive prosumer software and social media marketing tools allow you to decide for each task of a marketing action if you want to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. The same choice that OSS customers can make between investing time (install, configure, extend yourself) or money (get support and services from the OSS vendor) is true for OSS companies marketing their product.
For example, do you want to create the product screencast yourself or have a marketing agency record it? Do you want to upload it to YouTube or run your own video streaming platform? This choice allows you to keep your marketing efforts for a product launch low at the beginning and to expand your marketing budget over time as revenue grows.
The InitMarketing team keeps growing. This time Andreas Heer from Switzerland joins us.
He is a great addition due to his strong background as a journalist of German-speaking newspapers and magazines in Switzerland. Andi is a board member of /ch/open, the Swiss Open Systems User Group. With Andi’s expertise, our Open Source marketing services can only become better.
Andi, great to have you on our team!
I am happy to announce the winner of the InitMarketing logo contest. We received 34 logo submissions and we would like to deeply thank everyone who participated. It was great to see the logos coming in since the very first days of the contest. Many of them are well thought out and we very much appreciate the time each of the participants invested to contribute their ideas.
And the winner is: “Orange Hit” of Wirawan Harianto.
Four out of five InitMarketing team members opted for the winner logo. We believe that it is a true iconographic representation of InitMarketing. In fact, the creator of the logo said it himself so well in his logo description.
Wirawan Harianto is currently a second year graphic design student in Sydney Graphics College, Australia, wanting to specialize in Web Design. He is an open-source enthusiast translating online documents of open source projects into his native language, which is Indonesian.
We will now develop our corporate design together with Wirawan, which will include:
Following the open source tradition, we make our corporate design efforts public and welcome everyone to contribute with feedback, starting with the logo’s first revision.
It would not be too far fetched to talk about some of Microsoft’s PR talk related to Open Source as driven by a burned lands strategy in the past years.
Let’s leave the past behind. Let’s assume that Microsoft is seriously concerned about interoperability and openness. Let’s assume they are trying to understand how the Open Source business works and want to engage with Open Source companies in a friendly manner. Let’s not discuss whether Microsoft opens their APIs due to a self-decided business strategy or whether the EU made them make the decision.
Let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.
To understand the position Microsoft is in from a marketing communications perspective, take a look at the following analogy: Imagine a country that invaded a foreign land and actually burned the lands to defeat its inhabitants, but without military success. The invaded country was able to defend itself and won the war. Imagine business men of the aggressor country coming back one year after the war trying to establish business relationships.
As a citizen of the invaded country - would you trust those business men?
I can imagine that those Microsoft employees who by their corporate role and conviction sincerely want to establish mutually beneficial relationships with Open Source companies and communities face mistrust. They are often being accused of the “old crimes” and are being seen as the enemy.
As of today, Microsoft is in the middle of constant crisis management with Open Source. To get out of it, it seems Microsoft is rightly entering an era of diplomacy and friendly (naturally somewhat unclear) statements which are supposed to help grow trust between Microsoft and the Open Source community. This effort of small and large steps will have to balance naysayers as well as yaysayers to produce realistic results. Hence, it will be important for Microsoft to stay focused and committed.
While at the Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum and OSBC, one could witness Microsoft’s diplomacy at work:
Even to Microsoft, Open Source has proven to be a viable and lucrative business – why else would they partner with Open Source vendors? From there, it is just one more step for Microsoft to adopt Open Source business strategies themselves for relevant products or parts of them.
With Microsoft being a company relying on partners for 96% of its revenues, it will be highly important to drive innovation by building its partner network not only on top of commercial interests and proprietary software, but also on merit and fame for great software development achievements - a huge benefit of Open Source communities.
Microsoft needs to leave behind the scorched earth policies that clearly don’t work. Microsoft’s top executives need to re-state and re-assure that they want to live in peaceful coexistence and cooperation with Open Source. Most of all, Microsoft will have to accept that patent gimmicks won’t get them anywhere in their quest to play nicely with the Open Source community.
Otherwise, Microsoft will continue to cripple itself when it comes to additional strategic business options available with Open Source – not being able to apply OSS business strategies to some of their own products or growing cooperation with OSS vendors and projects. The intended acquisition of Yahoo! will be ill-fated without Microsoft successfully building a good relationship with the Open Source community, given that prominent community members such as PHP’s Rasmus Lerdorf are key to Yahoo!’s success.
The goal for Microsoft is to get past the point where they rely on the Open Source community giving them the benefit of the doubt and instead leverage the potentials of Open Source to Microsoft’s own advantage based on trustful relationships with the cathedrals and the bazaars.
As of today, Vikram will join the InitMarketing team and run the InitMarketing office in Bombay, Maharashtra India. He is an experienced technical writer who already published several LAMP books and contributed articles to various developer zones such as IBM developerWorks and Zend devzone. Furthermore, Vikram has an MBA from Oxford University and thus blends technological expertise with business know-how.
I am very happy to welcome Vikram on board, especially because now InitMarketing can provide better marketing support to the emerging Open Source market in India.
My former appreciated boss at Mindquarry started to offer his business know-how as an independent consultant for software companies in Germany: Stephan Voigt was CEO at Mindquarry and I always enjoyed working with him while being the VP Marketing there.
Stephan offers consulting services such as:
His focus is not on Open Source software only, but of course he has expertise in that area.
All the best for your business, Stephan!
At Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) next week, Brad Smith, general counsel for Microsoft, will keynote the event. A panel and the audience will be able to ask him questions right after his presentation.
InitMarketing fellow Stephen Walli blogged some questions he would like to see raised and I set up an area where everyone can post questions and vote as well as comment on suggested questions: What would YOU ask Brad Smith at OSBC?
The deadline for submitting your take on a logo for my Open Source marketing consultancy is approaching quickly, being March 31st.
Several nice logos have already been submitted:
You got a better idea? Submit an InitMarketing logo and win an iPod touch (32GB) plus $50 iTunes gift card.
Feel free to rate and comment submitted logos.
Sandro Groganz alias "ordnas" practices and fathoms the art of marketing and community relations in the domain of Open Source. He is founder of InitMarketing, an Open Source marketing consultancy.
