Marketing Message for Calligra

[Cyrille Berger Skott]

On Thursday 22 December 2011, Inge Wallin wrote:
> With due respect, I think you are totally wrong here.  It never pays off
> in  marketing to be humble.  Really, what do you hope to achieve (or avoid
> for that matter) by being humble?
It also never pay off to brag. And I want to avoid Calligra to be know like 
KOffice as the suite of application that promises wonder and deliver nothing.

You can make all the fun you want of LibreOffice attempt to port to Android, but 
if you go outside of the Calligra community, people perceive us as the people 
who have been trying for 14 years to deliver an office suite for the desktop. 
And now, we will start bragging to be leading on the free office suite market 
for mobile, and if you scratch under the surface, you will discover that we 
are positionned on a dead tiny fraction of that market.

By being humble, I am hopping to avoid damaging the Calligra brand to the 
extend the KOffice brand had been.

And don't misunderstand me, I think we should be proud that Calligra is used 
on the N9, it is a good achievement, and we should go around and talk about 
that. However lets avoid to create a mountain out of a mouse.

Merging an other email, since it is on the same topic:
> I know it's sometimes laughable, but the reason people do it is because it 
> *works*.  All marketing textbooks say "you need to find a niche where you are 
> the leader and then tell everybody about it". 

I am also hoping that every marketing textbook start by telling you to define 
who is your target. And to adjust your message for them.

Assuming our marketing target is geeky technical people, who know and follow 
open source project. Those people get suspicious with excessive "bragging", 
and while they know of the N9xx Maemo/Meego, they also know it is a very niche 
stillborn market. And will go and think, yeahyeah, they are the leader of 
nothing (and if they know from where Calligra comes from, they will think that 
people never change).

Worse, if our target is outside of that group, chance is that they don't know 
much about "free software", or meego and the N9. All they know is iphone and 
the cheap version of iphone (some of them know that it is called android). For 
them "the leading free office suite for mobile", free will translate to 0€, 
"mobile" translate to iOS or Android, and since it is available to neither, we 
are just liars.

-- 
Cyrille Berger Skott