[Bf-marketing] Corporate Identity

[Frédéric van der Essen]

I also think blender needs some marketing, I try to promote blender at my Univ, french websites and some friends working in the pro CG-industry. so here is little stories on how well worked different approach to promote blender. It might help you :)

Until not a so long time ago, when people where asking me, what is this blender exactly ?, what is the goal of the developpers ?, what is it for ?,I told them "blender aims to provide a high quality 3D tool for everyone". Because that's just what blender was in my mind. That's the OSS state of mind "hi quality for everyone". This worked a lot at the university (engineering/science) People use it more and more for arch-previz, shematics in reports,etc... It worked midly in web forums.
It worked well for hobyist artists, And to my surprise it was totally counter productive for pro-artists.

Professional artists can't conceive that a high quality tool can come for free and be "for everyone". They buy a lot of expensive stuff that don't work well, and people told them non stop "you didn't buy it expensive enough !!!" They want to be cool and have things that their competitors cannot buy. 

"You now, i use this revolutionary and expensive app that even if you were rich like me, you couldn't understand because you aren't a genius like me" Blender was this kind of thing for a moment, but now that it is "the tool for everyone" In artists mind it goes like "I deserve a better tool than something for everyone" 

Then there were the most complicated type of person i ever met - an "art director" Take an artist, mix it with a director and you have someone who wants something really productive, and really cool. the "when i told "for everyone" to this guy he just laughed, thinking i was some kind of crazy utopist :S

With those guys, artists and boss-artists the best way i found is not to tell them anything. Blender is a "mystery" and show them what it does. Show them only the very cool things that they haven't seen in other apps. And then suddenly the guy screaming "I tried it once and it's crap" is quiet and looking with interest at you playing with blender hair system or lscm. Then when they are convinced that blender can offer them something, they ask "can it do this ? can it do that? Let's try it" and nobody complains with the interface.

If an artist think blender is the next thing to have, they will not complain with learning new way of doing things (crazy interface)
If an artist think blender is a cheaper alternative to existing programs, they will complain a lot, because they just want a clone of their app. (and they will have a negative approach since they already paid a lot for their apps, so something free really can't be better)



>Here's what I think lacks. Blender should really have a tagline, I have 
>no idea what yet but something along the lines of Nike's "Just Do It" 
>or HP's "Invent".

This makes me think that, before determining all the concrete marketting stuff, we should first agree on what is currently wrong with blender's perception by the outside world, and more importantly agree on what are our user target, because all the stuff we are doing will depend greatly on what is our target.



>The homepage could also have some kind of teasing stuff to get people 
>interested. If people see cool stuff, they'll be more ported into 
>working their asses off to learn instead of bitching the interface. 

IMO that's the critical point. Showing cool stuff. Showing blender's unique features greatly executed, showing interview of artists, showing great renders with interview of artist, stuff that makes the artist want blender. 

Many thing on blender website could be improved that way. Look at the gallery, it shows "November" with not so great renders on the top.
People looking at this right now think "not only not a lot of art is produced, but it's not so great. Ordering it by favorites would solve that issue by showing greatest render first. And below there would be "newest" so that they see that art is being produced :)


>A few dev journals maitained by the marketing crew showing what's up 
>behind the walls to keep people on the edge in the dead times between 
>version. It also helps showing there's people behind Blender and that 
>something is actually in the works (in here we all know there is, but 
>average joe visiting Blender can't figure out.

Good idea.


>I firmly think we should work on  the  sense of belonging to Blender, 
>best may to spread Blender is word to mouth. If we could get some viral 
>marketing going on, maybe series of fun little videos realized with 
>Blender with the help of different "feature animators". Things of a few 
>seconds, good humour.

It can bite us in the back. Official work will always be considered as an insight on blender's top possibilities. If the anim is not 100% pro, people will think  that blender is not able to provide pro quality.