[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

Thu Sep 30 13:21:04 CEST 2010

A group of the marketing and communication peoples got together to get our 
+heads around Vision and  Mission Statement.  Everyone brainstormed what they 
+saw as the core values of Mageia to give a direction that the Projects Vision 
+and mission statement could head.  
+
+The reasoning behind this is it points a figurative arrow at our  primary 
+target market and thus gives us a guide toward where our branding should be 
+aimed.  
+
+A mistake that is often made is branding from an internal aesthetic when in 
+fact branding should be more aimed externally to attract a new demographic.  
+If the gods are in alignment then ideally it should point toward our principle 
+point of difference and again this influences our branding choices in terms of 
+Colour Pallet Logo and so forth.
+
+The "feel" to me that came from the brainstorming was that Mageia could be 
+marketed as the "Family Distro".   This being a principle point of difference 
+when a user makes a decision as to what operating system to run.
+
+Our principle competitor, MS competes against the Linux universe as a whole 
+but other distros compete for the MS user base aimed at particular 
+Demographics. For instance: 
+OpenSUSE aims at the "Power User" Market   
+Ubuntu aims at the young individual end of the market
+CentOS at Community enterprise and Not For Profits
+Fedora at the Computing Professional
+
+Mageia could therefore aim at the Young Married professional market, being the 
+Distro that could be installed on the home computer and geared so that the 
+whole family could use it.
+
+So for instance as well as the standard software, educational programmes would 
+be installed by default, be NetSafe (Dans Guardian), have OOo4Kids installed 
+as well as a full office suite, Tuxtype, TuxPaint and so on.
+
+Documentation added to show parents how to set up accounts for the kids and 
+how to make it Net safe.
+
+I think that this is an untapped market right now and something that the 
+project could leverage into a marketing campaign and guide us in terms of 
+branding.
+
+Comments?
+
+Cheers
+GL
+
+-- 
+Graham Lauder,
+OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ
+http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html
+
+OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
+
+INGOTs Assessor Trainer
+(International Grades in Open Technologies)
+www.theingots.org
+