Open Sourcing the Playbook for Blue Ocean Marketing

The open source community shares its code and ideas and this blog is designed to open source a playbook on blue ocean marketing and a deliver  “Blue Ocean Ten Point Plan”.

I lead marketing for one of the largest private open source software companies and as a result I am regularly asked to describe the approach we take to “open source marketing”. My initial response always is "Have you read Blue Ocean Strategy”. I am a huge fan of this and we have extensively applied it to open source and consumerizing the enterprise software space over the last four years. Many of us at Alfresco previously worked at Documentum, which was the poster-child company for Geoffrey Moore’s  "Crossing
the Chasm". The chasm came with a standard “Ten Point Plan”.  What we saw was that there was no standard, “Ten Point Plan” for disruptive “Blue Ocean Marketing.”

In thinking about this recently, it struck me that what the community needs is a playbook for marketing to the Blue Ocean. That's the impetus for this blog - to  "open source" a Blue Ocean Marketing Playbook. This blog is an attempt to review what we got right, what we got wrong and what we have learned along the way. Specifically, I will go into depth on a "Blue Ocean Ten Point Plan" examining areas such as:

1. Redefining Market Segmentation – Maximizing
   Blue Oceans and Long Tails
2. Redefining Positioning – Offering the
   “Best-of-Both” worlds and Value Innovation
3. Moving from Outbound to Inbound Marketing and
   Demand Generation
4. Community Building – Getting Found then Getting
   Talked About
5. From Inbound Marketing to Managing an Inbound
   Funnel through the Company
6. Massive Volumes need No-Hands Nurturing and
   Content Marketing
7. Free – The New Value Proposition, Pricing and
   Packaging
8. Redefining Competition – From Products to
   Enterprise Sales and Marketing Models
9. The New Whole Product
10. The New Barriers to Entry

When this comes together and works you move from a traditional outbound marketing model to an inbound model, epitomized by the book “Inbound Marketing” (Halligan and Shah) where over 80% of your opportunities find out about you and come to your website to try your product.  In open source specifically you get a network effect where the inbound model rapidly creates a category leader and often most people cannot even name the number 2 in the category. Mini gorillas are formed.

This blog incorporates and blends other leading strategies from “The Long Tail” , "Free" (Chris Anderson), “The Marketing Playbook” (Zagula and Tong), “Marketing Warfare” (Trout and Ries) “Inbound Marketing” (Halligan and Shah).

As I said up-front this blog is about “Open Sourcing the Playbook for Blue Ocean Marketing” so I welcome comments on what you would like covered, challenges you are facing and strategies that have worked for you.