One other very noteworthy keynote at Oscon last week was Steve Yegge's presentation "How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevent in Two Easy Steps which you can view on Blip.tv. While Steve had some technical problems displaying his slides, he gave an outstanding presentation which could have easily been called "Marketing 101 for Geeks." His basic tenet is that brand matters. Or in programmer terms, brand is a One other very noteworthy keynote at Oscon last week was Steve Yegge‘s presentation “How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevent in Two Easy Steps which you can view on Blip.tv. While Steve had some technical problems displaying his slides, he gave an outstanding presentation which could have easily been called “Marketing 101 for Geeks.” His basic tenet is that brand matters. Or in programmer terms, brand is a pointer that helps people make decisions. He gave an example of being in the store and trying to chose between two products: Quick C and Turbo C. Which one sounds better? (Turbo, obviously!) Steve gave some other classic examples ranging from New Coke vs. Classic Coke and phone giant GTE who had such a miserable brand that their only option was to change their name to Verizon. And then on the technical front he discussed brands such as JavaScript (an awful name) and Eclipse. But branding is much more than product name or PR. A brand stands for the experience customers have with a product. GTE’s brand sucked because its products and services sucked. And as Steve pointed out, its hard to change what a brand stands for. That’s why for many developers Eclipse has a great brand, but its generally known as a great Java IDE and not as an “open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle” which is what it says on their web site. In my view, its better to have a more narrow, more clearly defined brand or position in the market than try to cast a wide net and stand for nothing. That’s the reason its hard to have brand extensions. If you make too radical of a shift you can end up diluting the brand to the point where it has little meaning. That might be one reason why companies like Dell and Gateway had a hard time extending into retail operations selling big screen TVs. Their brands stand for computers, not consumer electronics. Interestingly enough, Sony has been successful in both and Apple could probably pull it off if they wanted to. Why is that? Probably because the Apple brand stands far more for “cool design” and “good usability” than it does for computer. But keep in mind, Apple has taken many years to get to this point. Before Steve Jobs returned to the company their brand was starting to stand for “irrelevent”. I think most people understand the ideas of branding quite well when they look at other products, but have a hard time applying the lessons to their own products. Yegge also mentioned the book “22 Immutable Laws of Branding” by Ries and Trout. Ries and Trout also wrote the book “Positioning“, which is a classic in marketing. Pretty much anything they wrote is worth reading. You don’t become an expert by reading one book on the subject, but these are good references for those interested in learning more about marketing. Also check out Steve’s blog for more “random whining.” Open Source