< back to offsite schedule

Topics for discussion

• review of our current situation: user base, competition, and our capabilities
• marketing planning and brainstorming session around goals for 2006
• market research underway / proposed
• international expansion

Comments

For reference, here are the slides we shared yesterday: http://www.numenity.org/docs/mktg-offsite-post.pdf

I'm working on a blog posting about the offsite and next steps on the marketing planning end. I'll add a link here to that post when it's ready. I also have additional notes to add below shortly.

Thanks to everyone who participated; it was very helpful to have this discussion.

-pkim

Notes

• pkim showed a presentation (that was "not a presentation") with some numbers on usage, downloads, etc
• "the downloads metric can quickly bite us if/when it slows"
• tristan: note that usage numbers taken on weekends serve us better as we have more users at home than in offices
• no good idea why Finland and Slovenia are at 30%, might be a non-representative sample
• Canada/US adoption roughly equivalent at 12-14%
• stats from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
• zak: APs requires a lot more advocacy and education, and they aren't as big on the OSS thing as the western nations
• goals are new users in 2006 through distribution, partnerships and marketing
  • beltzner: how do we count our unique users?
  • cbeard: in a month we'll have much better data than we've ever had, but the update infrastructure will give us some good ideas about how many 1.5 users are out there in the world
  • jlilly: this is a universal problem for us - we're somewhat blind as to who our users are, what they're doing, how they got us, etc.
  • cbeard: the new data will also give us compare and contrast between downloads and copies that are running
• aaronlev: we should partner with computer repair sites who do "tune ups"
  • cbeard: we know that a lot of these sites are doing this informally
  • tristan: there are probably other such channels that we can exploit
  • jlilly: we need to pick carefully though to make sure we're leveraging and exploiting the channels with the most impact
• pkim: adoption model 1: we currently have power users and early adopters, need to move out one "ring" and get the next group, which are comfortable/skilled computer users who are likely to install
• pkim: adoption model 2: classic chasm, where are we?
  • zak: bundling is the only way we're going to cross that chasm
  • mkaply: bundling isn't everything, it's adoption; we can put the icon on the desktop, but unless they use it, we're doing nothing
  • aaronlev: we need to have "download firefox" on google.com
  • jlilly: these are all hard statments, I'm curious as to why you think there's one way to do things
  • mkaply: people need a reason to do something other than the default and shortest path route to their goal (in this case, surfing the web)
  • aaronlev: there's a lot of brand identity involved here, like shown in the RocketBoom video
  • hecker: I think there's multiple reasons that people use it, not just an affinity for brand
  • sgarrity: there's also motivation to try
• pkim: 2006 opportunities
  • sustaining marketing for 1.5
  • planning for firefox 2 launch
  • vertical customization/affinity
  • mainstream experiments in marketing - targeting different demographics
  • international expansion
  • research
  • brand building
• cbeard: vertical customization is a way to get partners to distribute for us
• hecker: instead of verticals alongside businesses, do vertical by task