Re: Marketing followup

[Kazunobu Kuriyama]

Dennis Leeuw wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I have found some marketing people that can help me formulate what the 
> problems are and what we can do about it. In a quick consultation I 
> formulated the following problems:
>
> - The popularity of the name (not many people know the GNUstep project)
> - The look and feel (NeXT interface is perceived as outdated)
> - The programming language: Objective-C is not a well know language
> - The history (it took a long time to get where we are)
>
> Could people look over these and add or comment on them?
>
> I also took the liberty to ask what could be done about the above points.

Having read another your recent mail, I had the impression that one
of the marketing guys seemingly emphasized the importance of defining
targets.  So I presume that, when the suggestions below were being
made, there must have been one or more targets in her/his mind.  I'm
wondering what/who those targets were.  (Though I can guess them to
some extent, I'd still like to have some clarification to avoid
possible confusion.)

I think that it depends on a target whether each of the suggestions
is applicable or not.  Without clarifying targets, we would begin to
talk about something based on our point of view only, not that of
possible targets. This would indicate that the marketing is doomed
to failure.  Marketing is all about the perception of others.

> History: The reply was to not worry too much about this. When 
> communicating keep telling that the problems were of the past and show 
> the progress that is made in the last couple of years.
>
> The language: This was perceived as the hardest part. Working with a 
> lanuage that is not familiar to most programmers requires a lot of 
> marketing. The first idea was to create a list that shows the 
> highlights of the language then create documents that tell e.g. a Java 
> programmer how to do things in Objective-C, and also for C programmes, 
> C++ programmers etc. So an article per programming language.
>
> The look and feel: The answer quite frankely was: programmers might 
> not care, but as soon as users don't pick the app, because it looks 
> old, programmers don't want to create an app. Even when I told them 
> about the benefits of the interface, they insisted on a new look... 
> well they are marketing people :)
>
> Name popularity: The first idea was to change the name, so it would 
> sound good. I told them that was not an option. Then they suggested 
> the news items for the news sites we are already talking about.
>
> Ideas? Comments?
>
> Dennis

Thanks,
Kazunobu Kuriyama