As you may know there have been several changes to the marketing team in the past few months. Kian Gould, who was marketing leader for several years, resigned and Peter Pröll, Eike Diestelkamp, Frederic Gaus left as well. That means we are now a group of 5 members : Berit Hlubek (Co-Lead), Boris Hinzer, Christian Händel, Ben van ’t Ende and Alain Veuve (Leader).
We are currently in the process of redefining our mission of marketing of TYPO3. One part of that process is about developing a marketing strategy.
Finding a strategy in general is not an easy task. Its usually done by a small group of strategists or executives who then, once decided, implement it top down to whatever organisation they run.
In our community things don't get done this way, though a marketing strategy is still needed. The upcoming release of Neos will definitely make us a three product brand and we need to have answers to questions from all kinds of people such as customers and press, but also our own community as well.
Questions like:
- I have a medium sized project? Which of the TYPO3 products should I use?
- Is Neos the perfect system for Microsites?
- Can I use both Neos and TYPO3 CMS for an Enterprise class project?
I am pretty sure you have been involved in a conversation revolving around this in the past. Giving answers is hard, most of all because we just aren't aware of the positioning of the products. That’s where strategy comes into play and it’s why the marketing team decided to organize a strategy workshop at the Marketing Sprint Week.
The Marketing Strategy Day in Altleiningen
We invited a wide range of people from all kind of fields in the community. We asked Jochen Stange from <link http: www.medienagenten.de _blank>Medienagenten if he would moderate and organize the workshop which he kindly agreed to and so we started with a group of 17.
Attendees: Jochen Stange, Ben van 't Ende, Berit Hlubek, Christian Händel, Alain Veuve, Boris Hinzer, Christopher Knapp, Christian Müller, Christopher Hlubek, Oliver Hader, Helmut Hummel, Anja Leichsenring, Olivier Dobberkau, Sven Ditz, Mathias Schreiber, Jens Hoffmann, Sascha Lüönd.
The first part was a brainstorming session about the strengths of each product. In a second step every attendee had to select the three most important items from this collected list. The result from this looks like the following:
TYPO3 CMS (vote count in brackets)
- Resilience as a product, surviving so many trends and hypes (7)
- Long Term Support (6)
- Extensibility / Extension Ecosystem (6)
- Community (5)
- Language Support (4)
- Templating (3)
- User Rights Management (2)
- Easy Updates (1)
- Huge Install Base (1)
- Scalability (1)
TYPO3 Neos
- Author/Editor Experience / Usability (8)
- Less PHP needed to achieve goals (6)
- Staging / Publishing Model (4)
- Deployment friendly (4)
- API / Interoperability (4)
- Flexible Content / Dynamic Content Repository (3)
- Uses Flow as a framework (2)
- Semantic output (1)
Flow
- Focus on problem solving (7)
- Strong CMS based on Flow available (5)
- Guidance to develop high quality products (5)
- Innovative, strong programming standards (2)
- Closely integrated template engine (1)
- Toolbox (1)
As you can imagine there has also been a lot of discussions about details and the workshop process has been questioned as well. While this is a must in every educated group of people to a certain extent, doing so too much leads to nowhere. By lunchtime the discussions heated up more and more and the workshop seemed to get stuck. Looking at our group closely revealed we were concerned about the future of TYPO3 CMS.
What will TYPO3 CMS be in the future?
- Will it be a strong parallel product with as much innovation and development as Neos and Flow?
- Will it become a lame duck, still here but with no gravity?
- Will it vanish completely?
It was pretty clear that what was on peoples’ minds was the future of TYPO3 CMS. Jochen Stange was swift to realize this and the 4 of us quickly put together an adapted plan for the afternoon. This plan would address the questions about TYPO3 CMS as well as give some strategic insight to the positioning. So after lunch we did three things:
Painting a picture of what is TYPO3 CMS for you now
The group was divided into 4 subgroups and they were obliged to draw a picture that represents the current state of TYPO3. While painting these pictures was fun - they revealed a lot about how people think about our products. Generally all of the pictures revealed that TYPO3 CMS is a solid and powerful product. A product that has come of age but still fulfills its tasks well. The other point was about uncertainty of its future. I will not show the pictures here as they are fun, but nothing but fun without an explanation. Ok, lets make one exception :-)
Small-, Medium, Large Customer Matrix
The second thing we did was that we handed out a matrix. It looked like this:
The task was that everybody attending fills in the products they see in each field for now. In the first column you had to place the products you see today and in the second column the attendees should fill in the products where they see them in 3 years.
Everybody shared their results and an interesting and fruitful discussion evolved out of this. I have collected all the sheets and consolidated the information; have a look at it here:
The red underlined results are the clear ones, meaning that there was a major gap between the votes. For the rest it’s more or less even. It was kind of surprising that a large group sees Neos being suitable for small customers as well.
Dream-TYPO3 CMS
The last task was about painting a picture of what would TYPO3 CMS be if we had all the time and money in the world. Again, some interesting and funny pictures have been created and the presentations of the pictures revealed that everyone would like to see TYPO3 CMS in a stronger position. Another point that was important seems to be that the backend should be revamped. It was pretty clear that everyone would like this.
Now, what is the result of the marketing strategy day?
Do we have clear results which we can now use in all of our communication and marketing efforts? No, we don’t.
While the diversity of the group was great, it’s obvious that the results mentioned above can not be representative for the whole community. I see the marketing team as some sort of enabler to gain findings on topics like these (beside creating lanyards…). Gain findings through workshops, interviews, surveys. Once we are sure about what the vast majority wants, we can harden the communication and marketing principles and activities and it will be backed up by the community. It’s again so much about communication - communication between teams, communication between the diverse stakeholders of TYPO3, but also about communication between individuals. The more the better, because it leads to common sense in the community. Maybe we should call it community sense which is really what we need, not only in terms of marketing.
Next Marketing Strategy Session
Having this in mind we have decided that we will follow up soon with another Marketing Strategy Session which will take place at the end of January/February 2014. We will announce the dates soon. This time everybody will be invited to join and the ones that have not been able to come to Altleiningen will get a call again from someone from the marketing team. We are looking forward to seeing you in 2014!
