Fedora brand WAS Re: Self-Introduction | John Adams, Red Hat Brand Manager

Valent Turkovic valent.turkovic at gmail.com
Sat Jan 26 23:11:29 UTC 2008


Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> Hey there :) 
> 
> Great to have you on board - I already have a question for you though so
> I hope you don't mind me just firing away. I don't know if it's relevant
> to you, or relevant full stop but...
> 
>> The reason I am telling you this?  I am eager to get involved with 
>> Fedora and leverage my skill set to help out however I can with Fedora 
>> brand management.  My relevant experience is in the areas of brand 
>> positioning development, brand strategy, brand architecture, naming, 
>> trademark management, and the evaluation of brand design elements 
>> (including logo, package design, and marketing collateral).
> 
> On the matter of Fedora's brand. Before we can market a brand
> (positioning, strategy etc) do we need to decide what Fedora's brand is?
> Obviously the project has a name, logo and a product. But going beyond
> that there was a long discussion a while ago about Fedora's target
> audience (see this post for some relevant info:
> http://mmcgrath.livejournal.com/7374.html). 
> 
> To sucessfully market Fedora, do we need to define what it is that
> Fedora actually is? Maybe other people have already figured this
> out...maybe this isn't relevant. Thought I'd ask though becuase that
> discussion interested me and I don't remember any particular resolution
> to it.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Jon
> 

Interesting article on livejournal, and I have seen the same argument 
raised on few mailing list threads and I heard it on some podcasts. 
Different people say it differently but it comes to same thing - that 
linux geeks love Fedora; they love using it, love contributing to it. 
love hacking on it. They all say the also one other thing - that they 
don't actually know what is Fedora for, or for whom.

It is not focused for a general destop (not even the fedora desktop 
spin) as strong as Ubuntu, it is not targeted as server distro (RHEL and 
CentOS are clear targets for that).

Some say that Fedora is a general purpose linux distro and that to me 
sound a bit negative. Other on a positive side say that it is a distro 
for linux enthusiasts and advanced users - and that sounds better that 
"general purpose" distro.

I would like to see fedora on mode "Joe User" type desktops not just 
linux geeks and that would mean a mode desktop focus and would look like 
catching up with Ubuntu (I don't know if that is bad or not).

Other way would be just to brand it as advanced linux destop or 
enthusiasts linux desktop... something like that because Fedora is 
definitely the most cutting edge distro out there (sometime too cutting 
edge :) )

I sometimes look at Fedora as great platform that maybe somebody else 
will take advantage of and make some desktop distro the same way that 
Canonical took Debian as a base and made Ubuntu on top of it.

I really like Fedora and I believe that it is on a good path...

Cheers,
Valent.




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