Via Manafu, I’ve found out today that Mozilla initiated a contest in which anyone can propose a marketing strategy targetted to get more people to download Firefox and convert more of these people to become regular users. The winner gets to manage that marketing campaign and also wins a $3,000 prize for coming up with it. Setting up an open contest for a marketing strategy project of an open source product was probably the most inspired campaign Mozilla could have thinked of.
Like probably most open source projects, Mozilla faces the challenge of customer retention. While a lot of people download open source software because it is freely available at their fingertips, most of those people only trial the application, but not change their old habits and often come back to the products they have been used to.
The goal is clear: more than 75% of the people downloading Firefox are not becoming regular users. How would you go about solving this issue? What is standing in the way between the current situation and the planned destination? The browser’s notoriety is pretty high (if you remember Mozilla’s campaign – spread Firefox – managed to sky rocket the number of browser downloads) and thus you probably don’t have to build up awareness, but rather go to the next level. How do you get those people who download the browser to use it and switch to it and how does the product brand contribute to it? How do you also deal with the browser’s competition (one of the most recent threats being that of Google’s Chrome)? What channels would you choose to communicate your strategy and which one would be the best?
The number of questions that can be asked in such a case can be staggering and the answers are most often quite difficult to find. However, I believe that the main issues one has to have in mind is an exhaustive customer segmentation (demographic, psychographic and behavioral), a great and innovative positioning statement (emotional reasons, but supported by functional reasons) and an appropriate choice of communication channels (customer touch points), all these having in mind the needs, wants and abilities of the targeted customers.
Good luck everyone and see you on www.impactmozilla.com!
