OSS brand building with the simple stick

Today’s consumers want to get the best prices, but offering your brand at a discount can undermine profits and threaten viability. Smart brands utilize strategies to create and sustain a meaningful difference that helps consumers justify spending more.”
Nigel Hollis
, in his PoV on branding.

I once read a statistic that at one point Apple owned 6.5% of the total handset market, but accounted for 75% of the entire industry’s operating profit. Now that’s a premium brand!

Whilst some in the OSS industry may claim their brand is the strongest, none come close to having the fanatic customer base that Apple has built. This makes me ponder what it would take to create a truly premium OSS brand.

People buy a premium brand for the enjoyment it brings them, either in the experience, the status, the prestige, the satisfaction of having a need met efficiently and probably many other variants on these reasons.

Three questions for you:

  1. For how many customers is the OSS buying experience an enjoyable one?
  2. For how many customers is the implementation / integration experience an enjoyable one?
  3. For how many customers is the user experience an enjoyable one?

Actual customer experiences in relation to the questions above might be 1) Confusing, 2) Arduous and 3) Unintuitive.

I’m going to take a completely contrarian view because the status quo clearly isn’t working. This contrarian view focuses squarely on simplicity. It seems that our developers are always building new functionality. However, most of the OSS functionality that users will ever need has already been around for decades. Rather than new functionality, how about a focus on making old functionality vastly more simple?

Rather than with Engineers, how about beating OSS with the simple stick by engaging marketers, designers, artists, stylists – the creatives – to improve the three experiences above?

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