Open source marketing
Open source marketing is marketing for open source applications. Marketing is usually done to get a commercial product on the market and thus increase commercial sales. With open source marketing, the marketers also try to place the product on the market, but the motivation is not a direct monetary one, but rather, as with the creation of the advertised thing itself, conviction and promotion of the idea.
The promotion of the market position is not primarily necessary with open source, since the production motivation is not market-based, but needs-oriented. So the main reason to create Open Source is not primarily market success, but mostly to meet a need of one's own, including that of a group. Once the needs have been met, i.e. the project can be used, the primary goal has actually been achieved.
Open source can, however, be used by other users. What creates a high added value and attracts more participants to these projects, which then leads to a collaborative effect and further dynamism. The conviction of open source users then leads to the idea of adding more employees than pure users to this system in order to generate higher demand and "production".
activities
In principle, the same measures are taken as in "normal" marketing. Due to financial difficulties, commercial advertising is not primarily used, but first and foremost recommendation marketing . Because here open source can play out its main advantages such as primary free of charge and product identification. But arguments such as usually higher security or better and more innovative extensions also play a role in attracting new users.
Classic advertising such as merchandising or even newspaper advertisements are also used occasionally.
Examples:
- For the official release of version 1.0 of Mozilla Firefox , the US initiative Spread Firefox placed a double-page ad in the New York Times, which was financed by donations.
See also
- Viral marketing , for marketing with open source method with active involvement of customers