LinuxWorld Marketing
What can you say about a tradeshow when the top vendor in the industry doesn’t bother to show up?
LinuxWorld was devoid of Red Hat this year, which says a bit about how secure Red Hat feels in their (current) leadership position. Their event schedule shows they are now targeting the executive ranks (Gartner summits, InfoWorld
executive forums) and key partner events (Oracle World). Red Hat started
life indoctrinating the techie caste, and holds them fairly firmly. This
left pre-Novel SuSE to mine executive prospects, which had measurable success (5,000%
rise in revenues SuSE achieved through this approach ). Red Hat is
trying to tie up what they didn’t have before … and what Novell may have let
lapse.
LinuxWorld has devolved back to its origins — a show where techies come to
learn more about operating system internals and how to better manage it.
The "suits" are gone, vendor marketing VP’s leave after the first day, and there
is little of anything newsworthy. Expect LinuxWorld to devolve more …
and perhaps disappear after a few years.
That having been said, there were interesting things to note in the realm of
technology marketing at LinuxWorld. Most notably is that Novell has new
passion and verve. They dominated the show, packed the isles during
presentations, and made attendees believe they had something important to say.
Oh, and they were "green" again.
When Novell first bought SuSE, I was party to some debate about branding.
One faction took the Larry Ellison "acquisitions will be assimilated" approach,
thinking that "SuSE Linux" should morph into "Novell Linux" within a year.
Others felt the SuSE brand was so strong changing too quickly — or at all —
would destroy market perception.
So Novell did exactly the wrong thing and tried to do both. Well,
that’s over with and SuSE green was the dominant theme at LinuxWorld. From
copy, to color, to marketing message Silicon Strategies wrote for SuSE years
ago, the core SuSE brand has escaped and was shoved into the faces of the
attendees, who ate it up! Welcome home, SuSE.
Yet the rest of the vendors were not doing as well. I walked 1/2 of the
show floor and ranked each vendor on their
core
messages. I had a very strict criteria:
- In 10 seconds or less I had to know …
- … what they offered and …
- … what value it provided
Pretty simple, eh? Anyone vending a product needs to be able to
communicate this succinctly. Otherwise they are spending money on a booth
which would be better spent on booze. I used this set of criteria on large
and small firms alike, and discovered that neither group did very well.
| Failed | Succeeded | |
| Small Vendors |
20 |
14 |
| Large Vendors |
4 |
6 |
54% of vendor booths could not communicate the very fundamentals of their
offerings in the allotted time. The bad part is that this is not
surprising, as core messages are one thing technology vendors do not do well …
especially software vendors. This was painfully clear as nearly 90% of the
hardware vendors I surveyed had clear statements about what their products were
(iSCSI PCI cards) and why they were better (10% more throughput).
But perhaps more surprising were those who did very badly. ActiveGrid,
who I personally think has a unique and useful product had incomprehensible
headline messaging. Bivio was worse, and Xandros had none. That’s OK
as PalmSource, IBM and Fujitsu all failed the test as well.
At the other extreme, Oracle and HP had it right.
Oracle had a simple message —
"Deploy Linux Faster" — which their in-booth partners echoed. HP was
a little more vague with "Linux Primed for Business", but their kiosks signage
amplified the core message with individual and specific claims, and the dual
mode messaging worked well. Other vendors who succeeded in communicating
their core value were Wyse (surprise), Unisys, EMC, Pentaho, Steeleye and
Emulex.
So what is the take away for today? Two parts:
First - LinuxWorld is changing: It is reverting to a techie fest with
little or no hype. Anyone targeting IT professionals not in the executive
ranks will find good prospects at LinuxWorld.
Second - messaging and passion matters: But if you cannot
communicate to a prospect as they are walking past your booth, then stay home.
You could hear the Fujitsu staff sighing in the void that was their booth, yet
you could not see the stage at SuSE given how deeply they were packing in
potential customers.
