Matthew Revell

One of the big four ideas of marketing is distribution (or place, if you want to make the four ideas into four Ps).

How your customers get your product is crucial to its success. In response to a Newsforge article, which glances at some of the most obvious aspects of marketing communications, an anonymous commentator makes two essential points:

1. “Marketing is not just promotion; it’s all decisions about price, product, placement, and promotion.”
2. “One of the most important aspects for a software is ‘placement’ — in other words: its distribution.”

Ubuntu’s ShipIt scheme - where thousands of free CDs of the Linux distro have been given to anyone requesting them - has been key to its success. Similarly, when pre-Novell Suse gave LUGs free copies of their boxed Linux, they were buying mindshare.

I don’t agree with everything the commentator says but it’s great to see, although the main article was a disappointment, another free software voice stating that marketing isn’t all shouting yer mouth off.