Matthew Revell

Marketing sits awkwardly between art and science.

Trouble is, big money goes into marketing and, if successful, even bigger money comes out. If you’re a business-person and about to hand 10% of your budget to a spangly-suited marketer, you want some reassurance. Marketing, as an academic discipline, provides this reassurance through theories, frameworks and studies.

Human beings are an awkward factor in marketing: you can’t guarantee that one set of inputs will result in a specific outcome. The closest that marketing can get is to say, “customers did this, we believe they did it because of our marketing activity and we have these studies to back that suggestion”. You can’t have a genuine control experiment. If you want to know why someone chose Nescafe over a brand of instant coffee that isn’t quite so foul, you can perform all sorts of studies to determine how much influence promotion, price, distribution or, unlikely as it seems in this case, product had. Despite your best efforts, two things get in the way:

1. People can’t always tell you why they make certain purchasing decisions.
2. Your marketing activity isn’t the only influence.

So, marketing people continue to come up with ever more elabourate, and often very useful, ways to measure their effectiveness and to help make success reproducible.

If we’re to introduce marketing to open source software projects, these theories and frameworks can help us greatly. While it’s important to remember that marketing isn’t a true science and that there are no guarantees, they can teach us what mistakes and what good decisions people have made previously.

It leads us, though, to the frustrated philosopher. Usually with good intentions, one or two people in an open source project point out that marketing is a well established discipline and that there are things to be learnt from other people’s experience. There are ways of doing things, they say, and that random marketing activity is of little use. In traditional business marketing, if you can’t measure your results, you’re wasting your time.

This is where I have to make my confession. A while back, I got stuck into frustrated philosopher mode. I was concerned that the Ubuntu Marketing Team needed to set SMART objectives, to have a strategy. After all, OpenOffice.org has a nice fat document in which they describe their five year marketing strategy.

Open source projects don’t necessarily work like that, though. OOo is, probably, an anomaly, for the time-being. I don’t advocate the eradication of plans, objectives, measurement, etc, as Pinko Marketing does. Instead, I think we marketers can learn something from the open source process: do it, share it, make it better, formalise it when appropriate.

People working on open source projects are giving out of limited time. Many of us want to see quick results, to reassure us that what we’re doing is worthwhile. With code, my impression is that the satisfaction of writing something and seeing it work is what makes a lot of people tick. Those of us interested in marketing open source software need that same kind of reward to keep us motivated.

There is also the rather odd relationship between community marketers and a commercial sponsor. More than likely, the commercial sponsor will have marketing plans and, quite probably these days, professional marketers. Commercial realities, professional marketers who are unfamiliar with the FOSS community and lack of time mean that true collaboration between a community marketing team and the sponsor’s marketers can be rare. Agreeing a common, mutually beneficial strategy can, therefore, be nigh-on impossible for commercially sponsored projects.

Although you’re taking a risk, because your marketing activity is likely to be outward facing, open source marketing should come from the bottom up. The same community processes that iteratively improve code can apply to marketing. It’s still important to aim to have a strategy and to be able to measure what you’re doing. However, to put that before all else will mostly only prevent any actual marketing activity from taking place and, if imposed by one or two vocal people, will probably fail to gain acceptance.

Marketing theory is important and useful. Strategy is important. However, while one or two people grow ever more frustrated because no one wants to set objectives, some other project is wowing everyone with its highly visible grass-roots promotional campaign.