Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Indeed, to compare slick marketing to things like an end user licence agreement or product activation is disingenuous. The first does nothing to restrict one's freedom; the latter two actively play a part in taking away one's freedom.
To some people, all marketing is evil. You write something brilliant and then keep it under a bushel. How will the rest of the world know? And doesn't the rest of the world need to know?
When there are all kinds of spinmeisters trying to market things that can only be described as crap, what's wrong with putting the best possible marketing brains to work for a good product?
The example which I always trot out at times like this is Betamax which beat VHS hands down. But it didn't win the marketshare needed to become the dominant standard.
Technically brilliant innovations may satisfy the deepest longings of geeks and their near and dear ones. But the spread of that technology is what we are talking about - and without marketing, and good marketing at that, nobody is going to bother about wonderful technology.
The Apple PC vs Mac ads work for just that reason; they are about good technology, they play to a mild form of snobbery and they portray one message - the Mac is incredibly cool and also performs its tasks competently.
The difficulty of creating such marketing that clicks is amplified by the fact that Microsoft has decided to give up on its Seinfeld ad campaign, the one which was supposed to get Vista moving out of the warehouses. After two ads which, in my opinion, were confusing in the extreme, the campaign has ended.
The question of spending money couldn't have arisen; it was just that you couldn't create enough buzz about a product that is akin to a lame dog. Not with all the Microsoft millions, not with one of the better comedians in the US.
With GNU/Linux, the story can be told effectively through a slick marketing campaign. For one, no operating system has a better mascot - the cuddly penguin is a seller right away.
Word of mouth advertising is good and probably very effective but a marketing campaign cannot set back the spread of GNU/Linux. Done properly and by the right professionals who know what they are selling, it would be of immense use to the companies that are seeking to make their next billion out of the free operating system.
Let's not rain on the concept of slick marketing. It has its place, and used properly it can create a buzz which years and years of hard work cannot.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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