DoctorMo's Blog

I’m been catching up to TedTalks from last year (2009) and last week I got to Simon Sinek’s talk How Great Leaders Inspire Action, in the talk he describes what he calls “The golden ring” which is his representation of how to communicate ideas in order to inspire and influence buying decisions.

So I figured I’d mix up the ideas on my blog and see if they can improve the communication and advertising of Ubuntu and Free and Open Source in general. The results are below but first I’ll quickly go over the ideas for those who skipped the above link and haven’t seen the video yet.

What Simon illustrates is the method in which traditional marketing messages work and he does so with a single circular diagram. Traditionally the messages move from the outside of the circle to the inside, from the What (the product), to the how (awesome features) and then finally sometimes to the Why (why should I care?). This outside in method is described as being logical and rationale by firstly showing what your selling and then explaining why people should buy into it.

The alternative method is illustrated with Apple’s marketing, where they predominantly communicate the opposite way round. First explaining the Why then the How then finally the product it’s self the What. This allows Apple to grab people by their emotive feelings which most of the time will override their logical deliberation and you’ll find people buying Apple products and making up rationale in order to justify their emotive decision making.

So I figured it might be possible to apply the same ideas to Ubuntu right, the problem is the complexity and confusion of the kind of message we want to promote. Apparently Ubuntu and FOSS means lots of different things to different people. So what I’ve done is pick out three different marketing messages and how we should communicate them effectively:

What are your thoughts?

I’ve made some relatively quick (I spent all day on them) posters, most are using existing drawings, some stuff is new drawings.

There are five posters to be hung on the walls of the booth we have at Anime Boston and one sign inviting people to take a CD. Although I’m not sure if we’ll need the sign since there at 17,000 attendees and only 400 CDs. We will see how these CDs go and if they all disappear pretty quickly, then next time we’ll have to get our own printed instead of going to Canonical’s ship-it service. But we do have 3,000 manga and the 1,000 flyers we have available and 100 special aluminium case badges.

I think it’s going to be a really great event.

I can still change these tag lines, so your thoughts and ideas are welcome in comments below.

There was an announcement today about the Ubuntu theme and branding change. I’m letting the theme digest for a day or two before I blog about it in any detail. Instead this post is going to talk about the logo branding:

I really like this new logo and apart from the logo inconsistency inherent in some of the draft uses of the new logo; the logo is sharp, professional and well designed in my opinion.

There was a concern amongst some Ubuntu community members that dropping the brown and orange, earthy crunchy, brand indicates a departure from a Home Desktop, human focused distribution and a re-badge to make the Ubuntu brand more acceptable to various new partners. I think that the orangey colours were very nice and I liked that we could tell an Ubuntu machine from across the room.

Although “precision, reliability, collaboration and freedom”, guys, that’s not a meaningful mantra. It’s not as catchy as “Free as in Speech” or “Of course! don’t you know anything about SCIENCE!”

What are your thoughts on the new brand?

In Wednesday’s Jono Bacon speaks, a really interesting idea came up. That we should try and describe what Ubuntu is, but only in one minute.

This is my entry into the competition:

[blip.tv ?posts_id=3232350&dest=-1]

I hope you like it, it’s quick and dirty and it’s only 40 seconds instead of a full minute. But I think it gets my point across about ownership.

There is a discussion going on in the Ubuntu Marketing team’s mailing list about creating Ubuntu videos in order to advertise Ubuntu to normal users. We got onto talking about existing adverts from Microsoft and Apple and I thought I’d share with the wider community my thoughts.

Interestingly when you look at the adverts for both companies you find an interesting pattern.

Often a leading brand / product doesn’t need to reference it’s competition, it just goes along with “We’re awesome, and everyone knows it”, The second fiddle is often comparing it’s self to the market leader.

What we have is Apple constantly comparing themselves to PC (even though an Apple is a PC and what they really mean is windows). Then Apple’s adverts were so successful that they put Microsoft on the defensive and they produced a bunch of laptop hunter adverts that mention Apple’s expensive laptops, unusual strategy for a market leader. But then the dynamic is kinda odd since Microsoft is a software company and Apple is a hardware company. so it’s not like they’re competing… not really.

But you’ll notice that every advert reinforces a set of ideas:

1) That there is such a thing as a Mac and it’s not a PC.
2) That a PC is Windows and nothing else.
3) That there are only two choices.
4) That you have to pay one way or another.
5) No one need worry about control when they get fancy features.

It’s interesting that we don’t play on our strengths of pointing this out, getting people to go “Oh hey there is something else, oh it can be installed on any PC, even Apple PCs, oh it’s free and I get to OWN it, control it, give it to my friends and even get involved with real people who make it, not just marketing departments.

There is a whole bunch of stuff we could focus on in very clever ways. But what I see a lot of here is tail chasing… lets copy them because they’ve spent money on those adverts. Perhaps people really have bought into the ideas in those adverts and that just sounds like the adverts were successful in telling their story and we want our story to be Microsoft’s or Apple’s because we were taken in.

But why do we want to tell the same story when we’ve a completely different narrative that’s run our communities for years.

Your thoughts?

I want to thank everyone who’s donated to our Anime Boston event. This first milestone means that the Massachusetts LoCo team are guaranteed now to attend the event in force, have our own table and be able to promote Ubuntu and Free and Open Source Software to everyone that comes. Thank you everyone!

The next goal is to keep on raising money to be able to buy print outs of all the information we want to communicate with attendees. So if you’ve not yet, please do consider sending $10 to our marketing campaign, after all it’s not often that we get to do marketing events of this size in the usa and we’d love to have print outs of the Ubunchu Manga to give out.

If you’ve also got good ideas for the kinds of material we should be giving out, let us know. Comments and emails are very welcome. We want to make this awesome event really go down with the very best marketing materials we have.

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I’ve just got home from a nice little Chinese/bar where I was unwinding and I got to chatting with someone and the conversation came to jobs and then to Ubuntu. I was attempting to explain that there are more choices than just Mac and Windows, but it seemed to just blow his mind that there could be anything more or better than windows xp or vista.

What we have in Ubuntu 9.04 and what we will have with Ubuntu 9.10 is more than good enough. It’s awesome and the general population who already use Ubuntu keep on telling us “why don’t more people know about this”. And that is also fustrating to them, they want to know where the problems are, and they assume Ubuntu has problems because no one knows about it yet.

The problem boiled down to advertising, no one I talk to has ever, ever seen so much as a sniff of tv, news paper, website, billboard or any other form of media marketing for Ubuntu. It makes the trust question very hard to answer and the only way people will listen is if you explain that it’s grass roots and not something used by huge businesses and millions and million of people all over the world.

We really need to start just getting the brand out there. Nothing spectacular. Just something that says “Ubuntu. For your Mac and IBM PC” and that it’s awesome. There isn’t a need right now to prove ourselves or over sell or use gimmicks, just getting the logo and the name in front of people and that it is a valid choice for computer use would be enough.

If we can’t have a corporate sponsor such as Canonical, IBM, Intel, Google, Linux Foundation paying for adverts, then perhaps it’s time we started doing something as a community. I’m not talking about the nascar 500 debarkle, but more of the firefox in the paper, full page spread kind of marketing. This kind of marketing would take real organisation though, lots of research and a lot of time to pull together all the people interested in making it happen. That’s probably why it’s not been done before.

Are there no community leaders interested in heading up marketing?