All too often, companies think of branding as a one-time effort: they define the market positioning, create a brand and logo to reflect this positioning, and then take this brand into the world. All marketing activities that follow from this – advertising, public relations, promotions, customer communication – are based upon the defined brand identity. The truth is that brands develop over time and while they mature, the messaging needs to be revised.

Brands Reflect Perceptions (and Vice-Versa)

A brand is special, because it is an identity constructed in our minds and it creates an emotional as well psychological connection between the company and its customers. Each customer is likely to interpret the same brand in a subtly different manner. Thus, a brand isn’t a “one size fits all” representation of a company; rather, it is the composite of multiple individual perceptions and emotions. As Daryl Travis, in his book Emotional Marketing, notes “…a brand isn’t a brand to you until it develops an emotional connection with you.”

What many companies forget is that a brand is a living entity. Just as a brand shapes customers perceptions, it too is shaped by perceptions – both of its customers and of its staff. And as a company learns more about itself over time, as it begins to look at itself from different perspectives, its brand too must evolve and reflect this additional knowledge and intelligence.

A Few Examples

If you take a look at some software brands, you’ll clearly see this evolutionary process taking place. Here are some examples:

• Apple‘s original logo (pre-1976) depicted Sir Isaac Newton under an apple tree. However, this was soon replaced with the famous “bitten apple” silhouette, which had cleaner lines…perhaps intended to highlight’s Apple’s clean, smooth designs. Initially filled with rainbow colors, the logo has evolved into a monochrome design – first black and then the current transparent/glass version. In short, as Apple’s unique design culture has emerged and as customers have also begun to recognize (and expect) cutting-edge design from Apple, the brand has evolved to match and reflect these expectations.
• Another interesting example is SugarCRM which, back in 2004, had a tagline describing it as “commercial open source customer relationship management”. However, as time has passed and the CRM category has become well established, the company has dropped this explanatory tagline from its brand identity. The cube-shaped logo is a relatively recent addition, and perhaps is intended to represent how its product brings together different facets of information to create profiles of customer relationships.

The Evolution of Identity

A brand’s identity typically goes through the following phases, which usually manifest in the taglines you find in Website headers or advertising slogans:

1. A young brand needs to be explained, thus a category-style tagline is chosen (just like SugarCRM did in its early days, see above).
2. The brand has established itself in its category, the company has a strong identity and changes its tagline to an emotional one (think Apple’s “Think Different” slogan).
3. The brand is the leader in its category and has a high visibility, the tagline is abandoned because the brand now speaks for itself (Apple or Amazon.com nowadays).

An analogy would be to compare brands with human beings. For example, when introducing yourself, you tell the other person your name, why you are there and perhaps what you do – just like in the first phase of a young brand. The better someone knows you, the more they will be able to decide how they want to relate to you and whether to enter a (private/business) relationship. The deeper the relationship, the more important emotions become. Once you and a related group know someone really well, you won’t have to explain to the group who e.g. “Marc” is, because they know him, thus the personal brand speaks for itself.

Given that brands are constructed in our minds, this analogy is actually quite powerful, because we are social beings and the way our mind works when it relates to something is greatly influenced by how we build relationships with other human beings.

Conclusion

What does this mean for you, the Open Source vendor? Simply this: as your product and your market evolves, you need to occasionally step back to refine and focus your brand strategy. In most cases, any changes you end up making to your brand strategy will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, reflecting the changes in knowledge and perception that have accrued to the company over the preceding period. Doing this every two to three years will help ensure that your brand is relevant and in tune with the needs, expectations and perceptions of your customers and yourself. Essentially, your brand will go through different phases of its identity, just like a human being does as it grows older.

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:

• Open Source start ups have usually only broadly defined a go-to-market strategy and target audience in their business plan, which is good enough for their VCs who are rather interested in the grand picture which allows them to assess the business potential.
• Those Open Source companies who have in the past years organically grown their business from a one or two man show of developers to 10-30 staff members have always somehow made money with their product. They intuitively understand their target audience, but never reflected upon it to expand their business more quickly with a focused marketing strategy.
• Even large to super-large corporations who are in the Open Source business much too often lack a good understanding of their target audience. The reason being that business decisions of top management (such as “let’s start to port our software to Linux”) are being executed with poor strategic guidelines.

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.

Due to solid demand, I will officially start my own business offering marketing consulting services to Open Source software creators and contributors in February. Clients will be able to choose from a broad range of marketing services, including strategic as well as operational tasks and social media as well as traditional marketing.

The mission is to help companies and organizations behind Open Source projects become more visible and profitable, hence to boost adoption of Open Source. The only criteria is that a client contributes to Open Source software development, which makes up for the following types of potential customers:

• Creators: Vendors of Open Source products
• Contributors: Companies offering proprietary software including Open Source components they contribute to
• Investors: VCs financing an Open Source venture

The consultancy will be able to help with:

• Defining an Open Source marketing strategy
• Open Source communications coaching of management
• Branding and positioning
• Community building/maintenance
• Building/maintaining a partner network crediting Open Source contributions
• Public relations (printed magazines, blogosphere, …)
• Collaterals (brochures, business cards, …)
• Events (e.g. (un-)conferences, partner meetings, …)
• Investor pitches
• Managing the contents of a client’s Web site
• Social media: creating product Screencasts, coaching bloggers, …
• …

One could completely outsource all marketing activities to the consultancy or take it in for specific projects or campaigns only.

I’ll be happy to share my experiences in this Weblog with you along the way and I will continue to provide general Open Source marketing know-how distilled from client projects to the public.

I’d also be happy to hear your advice.