Matthew Revell

Dad’s pants in the middle of his roll, dad’s pants in the middle of his roll.

www.dadspants.com

Vimto rocks.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article that, I hope, sets out the basics of marketing in a way that is relevant to free and open source software projects.

A few people have picked up on it, including:

• Novell’s Ted Haegar, “Revell does a good job at explaining the actual meaning of marketing, as well as well as its implications in the community of open source advocates”.
• Cote, a software industry analyst at RedMonk.
• Alex Fletcher, a technology analyst at Entiva, “marketing in particular should be a subject of interest for those involved with open source projects”.

Dave Neary has been blogging about marketing Gnome, in the run-up to this year’s Guadec conference. It’s fantastic to see marketing theory and practice applied to one of the most important free software projects.

I’ve been thinking, for a while now, about how marketing can find its place within the free and open source software world.

Over the past few evenings, I’ve put together an introduction to marketing concepts, along with some thoughts on how marketing people can begin to contribute to projects.

Read it: Marketing open source and free software.

I’d hate to work for Abbey. Eighteen months ago, they made a bold step in differentiating themselves from the other high street banks.

The agency they employed to carry out the reband said of it:

Wolff Olins has helped Abbey National reinvent itself. From now on, Abbey is no longer just another of the big six British banks - it’s something different: a company whose purpose is to help everyone get on top of money. The new Abbey was launched on 24 September [2003], with the message that “Abbey is turning banking on its head”.

Agency fluff aside, the new Abbey was about making money less scarey, without the faux-chumminess and slight smugness of Egg. This wasn’t just a name/logo change but was carried through in the language the staff used and the products on offer.

Although the “Me and my money” ads were a little creepy - people going about their lives with a miniature version of themselves, which represented their money - the advertising was creative and instantly recognisable. It was fresh, optimistic and rooted in situations that ordinary people could identify with.

Sadly, in the past week or so, Abbey’s controversial new Spanish owner - Banco Santander Centro Hispano (BSCH) - has thrown all of that out. A £3 million advertising campaign has been launched to support possibly the worst re-branding decision I’ve seen by a household name. Forget the Post Office’s change to Consignia, then to Royal Mail, as that had no effect on the bulk of the service’s users; it was a corporate, mainly overseas thing.

This is a move that replaces a contemporary, relevant and differentiating brand with one that makes the old Lloyds Bank look dynamic. Take a look at the Abbey website, you’ll see what I mean. There are no prizes for guessing that both the colourscheme and logo are in fact that of BCSH. The colours, logo and typeface are from another era and, in the words of one of my colleagues, “look like something a small town accountant might think was really groovy in about 1970″.

It all puts me in my place. The Abbey of recent times was about breaking down barriers; the new Abbey branding tells me to think I need them more than they need me. BCSH’s slogan is “Value from ideas” but the only idea I see in this reband is corporate egotism.

The billboard ads that have been designed to launch the rebrand show all the creativity of a bored teenager who’s rushed their GCSE Business Studies homework. Picture it: photo of woman with pensive look, thought bubbles coming out of her head, main bubble reads, “Are you thinking about changing your mortgage?”, or something similar. Man, if I’d suggested that at work I’d be laughed out of the place.

Lord knows how the BCSH branding will be expressed throughout the rest of the bank. If it’s consistent with the logo etc, I really can’t see it working in the UK.

When my phone died recently, I took up a 12 month contract with Orange, to ease the cost of a new phone. It was hard for me to give up the 5p texts and no line rental, that I had with the Carphone Warehouse’s Fresh network. It would have been harder to fork out nearly ?300 for the Nokia 6230 I wanted.

Now Fresh have reduced their call charges to 5p to any UK network or landline, and their texts to 1.7p (last I heard, the networks pay each other 3p, so that price can’t be long term). I thought I’d leave a comment on the Orange website, moaning that as I’m paying them ?25 a month, I should get texts at less than 10p each (which is a ridiculous amount to charge for the transmission of 160 characters of text).

The “thank you” message, after I’d clicked “Submit”, read:

Thanks for your suggestion! We’ll let you know if we think it is any good very soon..

That’s exactly how it appeared on their website. Wow! They’ll let me know if they think my comment is any good. What they hell sort of a way is that to talk to your customers?

DJ, one of the LugRadio faithful, mentions today’s advert for Firefox, in the New York Times.

Earlier this week, I attended a talk by Jaguar’s Head of Global Marketing Communications, Laurence Thomas. In it, he described how the company had worked to move the Jaguar brand from being seen as the old man’s favourite, to a credible, premium alternative to BMW, Mercedes, etc.

As Laurence described the substantial efforts his team had employed to effect the change, I began to think about two things we’d discussed during season 2, episode 3 of LugRadio:

• the role of marketing in open source software
• the NHS’s decision to stick with Microsoft.

Aq was very vocal in his opposition to any form of, what he might describe as, corporatism, including marketing, in open source software. Later, when discussing the NHS, Jono said that we had failed - “we” being the open source community.

Aq wants us to find a way, other than marketing, to build and promote open source software. Jono feels the collective pain of a community whose products, and organisation, are experiencing the shortcomings of not employing marketing.

Beautiful, fast software

During his talk about repositioning Jaguar, Laurence Thomas made it clear that changing the perception of a brand does not begin and end with some witty copy in an advert. Instead, the company needs a common goal and philosophy, which then creates the brand

Internally, Jaguar has a statement of purpose, which is intended to inform everything the company does:

Beautiful, fast cars.

Three words which are broad enough not to restrict but specific enough to be a meaningful guide for the company’s actions.

Rather than simply telling the world that Jaguar is different, they have actually changed the company, so that their products, service and communications all live up to a certain set of standards and ideals. The reality informs the brand.

This, my marketing-fearing open source friends, is what marketing is. It’s a management philosophy that evaluates needs and creates solutions to satisfy those needs. To use open source terminology - it’s about scratching itches.

Perhaps it’s useful to see how the marketers themselves describe marketing:

Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. Chartered Institute of Marketing definition.

In other words, marketing is not just advertising, nor is it dodgy door-to-door selling. Marketing is finding out what people need and giving it to them. The profit you make would normally be financial, but it could be any benefit that is worth more than the effort expended.

It’s reasonable to say that the open source development model already employs marketing methods. The challenge is to get open source proponents and project leaders to realise that marketing isn’t evil; it’s essential.

As Jaguar have shown, marketing isn’t about smoke and mirrors, or trying to fool people. Marketing is about creating a reality which is best for both the organisation and the end user.

I’ll be writing more on this subject, over the next few weeks. I’m sure I’ll raise the ire of some people, but there’s genuinely no need to fear marketing within open source; in fact, to dismiss it is to dismiss much of what already happens.

The Guardian’s media section publishes its Buzz 30 list, today. I hate these things: a few bored hacks do their best to fill a couple of spare column inches with their prediction of what people will consider cool, or hot … erm.

Blinkx, predictably, makes it to the list. The Guardian describes it as:

Dubbed the internet’s “first intelligent search engine”, Blinkx not only searches the web but also news sites, emails, attachments, blogs and your own hard disk. Unlike Google, it also uses artificial intelligence to rate stories, not page rankings. Only three months old, Blinkx has made quite a splash.

This is a perfect example of the crap that makes up these filler “what’s cool” columns. It’s no wonder that one of Blinkx’s founders is a PR expert. Like just about every mainstream hack writing about Blinkx, The Guardian reproduces the Blinkx PR line almost verbatim. I love the reference to “articial intelligence”; ladies and gentleman, I present to you ye magikale arteefishal intelleegence! The only place Blinkx has made a splash is amongst ill-informed, mainstream journalists who are desperate to scoop the Next-Big-Thing.

Why do I dislike Blinkx? Well, here are the first three reasons that occur to me: it relies heavily on Google, throws up poor results and doesn’t fit in with the pro-active way in which people use the web. But if that was all, I’d just ignore it. What I dislike most is the hype surrounding it and the unthinking, lazy press coverage it’s received.

Well done to the Blinkx PR team. If only you’d put as much effort into your product.

Rick Bruner, of Business Blog Consulting, has described a technique for gaining a one-off, massive rise in traffic to a blog.

He suggests writing a funny post and perhaps adding a picture of a scantily clad woman, so that humorous-link sites, such as Fark or, for British readers, B3ta might pick up on it.

Now, Rick doesn’t claim that this is the path to commercial blog success. However, even if you just want a quick burst in traffic, I recommend avoiding such tactics. I foresee several problems:

• it offers a freak spike in traffic, not sustainable growth
• the visitors you will attract are looking for something funny/someone scantily clad, not the normal content of your site
• you may alienate your core readership.

Of course, Rick would agree that there is only one way to grow a commercial blog: offer well-written, relevant and interesting content that would be difficult to find in that configuration elsewhere.

I believe that traffic, for traffic’s sake, isn’t helpful in building a successful commercial blog.

I admire anyone trying to launch a web design studio, particularly in a small town.

How do you cope with a market that, for the most part, doesn’t understand your business? Then there are some elements of your competition who have equally as poor a grasp and claim to undercut you by hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds?

Argweb, jointly of Stourbridge and Cologne, have come up with a nice scheme to get in the local paper. The post code of their Stourbridge office begins “DY”, for nearby town Dudley. So, they’ve printed a stash of “I love DY” tshirts, in the style of the “I love NY” shirts, and launched a website selling them. Brilliant! Tap into local pride + press the “local story” buttons of the regional press = media coverage and local good will. If they’re lucky, they might even sell the shirts, making back their minimal costs.

The local paper, the Express and Star, has run a story on the shirts, with subtle-enough a sales pitch for Argweb so as not to appear to be full-on advertorial.

I’m pretty sure the journalist had a grin on his face while writing the article:

For instance, while a New York tourist website pompously describes the city as the “capital of the world”, Dudley people for decades have spoken with pride of coming from the Capital of the Black Country.

Cringe-worthy comparisons between Dudley and New York continue but it’s all rounded off with a neat call to action, including the URL of the tshirt website.

Few people are going to take the tshirts seriously but I’m impressed with Argweb’s handling of the local press: they knew exactly which boxes to tick. Unfortunately, Argweb seem to be a little too keen on Flash-based websites. They clearly understand how to create appealing designs but make few concessions to the web as medium.

Anyway, I’ll have to ask my Cologne-based colleague if their local paper has a story on “Ich liebe Kolne” tshirts.