Open Source Marketing Rules need an Open Source Marketing Model
There has been a lot of interest and feedback since I originally wrote in my Blog Howells Ten Rules for Open Source Marketing. What I am going to do now is expand on what I originally wrote looking at each rule in more depth. Rules are of little use unless they have context and context is a model. The model is important as it determines behaviour and the relevance of the rules which change at different points in a products lifecycle. In the late 80s and 90s there were great technological advances with some companies succeeding and some failing. Geoffrey Moore created a Technology Adoption LifeCycle (TALC) model to explain this. This was also the basis to create a strategy - where everyone dreams of hitting the Tornado. Here I will discuss the model that Moore created in the early 90s that we followed at Documentum
- Early Market Discontinuous Innovation. Attractive to technology enthusiasts and visionaries.
At Documentum we created an objectrelational model and built a document model on top of this using a three-tier architecture.
- Chasm A pause of market interest when there is no natural customer group.
Documentum quickly had a number of large customers from pharmaceutical, insurance, aerospace segments. Documentum crossed the chasm by focussing on New Drug Application (NDA) process in the research part of the pharmaceutical industry.
- Bowling Alley Adoption by a specific customer segment for a specific problem. Attractive to pragmatists due to specific benefits not available with current technology.
The adoption of Documentum was incredibly rapid, with 38 of the top 40 pharmaceutical companies standardizing on Documentum in just over 18 months. It is now written about as a classic marketing execution of the TALC model and is taught at the Harvard Business School. The alley is about self-referencing - driving the same application to a different industry or a different application to the same industry. Documentum expanded into pharmaceutical manufacturing using a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) application (different application/same company). Self reference to a different industry is about recognizing the same technology for a different problem. An NDA is a structured, very large, document that has rules for submissions to different regions (rules driven virtual document). An Over-The-Counter (OTC) derivatives contract in investment banking is a structured document with more complex rules for different financial, geographic and legal situations. Documentum evolved its rule-based virtual document technology to manage investment banking documents. Later this became the largest market for Documentum. Documentum also expanded into the engineering construction companies that built the pharmaceutical plants
- Tornado Hypergrowth. Remaining pragmatists adopt on mass choosing the market leader as a new infrastructure
- Main Street Conservative Buyers who choose, not for competitive advantage, but not to get left behind
There is a good presentation on the web, from the Chasm Group, that discusses this model and relates it to eLearning. This is available at:
http://www.elearningforum.com/meetings/2000/november/chasm2.pdf
Later I will review Moores thoughts from almost 10 years later that he previewed in an article called Darwin and the Demon and discuss what is most appropriate for an Open Source Marketing Model.