[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

[Graham Lauder]

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