Marketing research

This page has been created to foster discussion on the use of Market Research by the Fedora Marketing team. rbergero is in draft mode right now.

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Questions to Answer

1. What questions do we want answered by market research - and how will we incorporate the feedback we get back into the development cycle?
2. Is there a budget for market research?
3. Is there a simple open-source tool for developing surveys to be posted and aggregating the answers?
4. Could we get companies to donate free swag (tee-shirts, netbooks, mp3 players, messenger bags, etc.) to provide as an incentive for completing surveys?
5. It would be awesome to have a Master List of conferences / Events where a laptop could be set up for on-site surveys. (Linuxcon, Linuxworld, Linuxwhatever, RH Summit, Linux Symposium, etc.)
6. Does Red Hat have any research that could legally be shared with Fedora (maybe a small group of people, or have one person be a gateway - ie: The Gateway person collects questions, and then asks RH market research folks (are there any??) if they can provide answers).
7. Does anyone have any contacts at any major PC / Server vendors (the usual suspects - Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, and the like) that would be a good starting point to see if they would participate in surveys about shipments? We would need a good blurb about why it would be important to participate and what they would get out of it (ie, they are good community participants, it helps them develop a broader market, they get access and input to free research, etc.)

Activities in the same spectrum - Related to Market Research

1. Benchmarking / ensuring the community is recognizing that someone is taking notice of market research results and doing something with it. ie: "Based on user feedback, Fedora 13 has developed / improved 90% of requested features in the following areas...."
2. Educating Fedora/Other distro developers on (a) what market research is and (b) how to use it or incorporate it into their planning / development. This could be a class, presentation given at conferences, guide, or <insert clever idea here>.
3. Develop a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly/quarterly newsletter dedicated to highlighting other market research resources that are available. (This information could also be tracked / disseminated / portal-ized on Fedora_Insight. This includes things like:
   • Reports done by the Linux Foundation
   • Reports done by anyone else that are free
   • Reports that aren't free but have really nice press releases that give out tidbits of information that could be useful.
   • Research / Survey information done by Fedora project marketing. :)

Proposed Market Research Categories / Projects / Surveys

Overview

1. Fedora-Centric Market Research. This research would answer questions like:
   • How is Fedora doing?
   • Feedback from Fedora-centric events (ie: FUDCon)
   • developer feedback
   • etc.

1. Fedora-Competitive Market Research. (This category could possibly be combined with #3.) This research would answer questions like:
   • (Of end-users): What distro are you using, please rank distros according to your preference, etc.
   • (Of developers): What distros do you make an effort to add your project to, why, please rank distros by their ease of contributions, etc.)
2. Community-Shared Market Research. This category is probably a little more ambitious; the goal here would be to provide market research to the greater Linux community in general, with the overall goal of helping to foster better decision-making, pointing out strength and weaknesses or market gaps with the goal of bringing new solutions / projects to Linux that meet end-user needs. Theoretically this not only brings new projects to Fedora - but helps to improve quality and/or availability of projects in general in the Wider Community. Most start-ups and/or projects do NOT have the benefit of having a boatload of money to spend on market research.

Additionally, and this goes without saying, I suppose, that this information would be published under some sort of open/ CC license. Working with other community distros to find out what questions THEY would like answered would certainly be encouraged and their contributions / analysis of both questions and results should be welcomed.

Fedora-Centric Market Research

The first two items listed are surveys which have been done in the past (in some cases, the very, very long ago past). I think they would be valuable to continue / start up again for input. Additionally, I've added some other suggestions for Fedora-Centric market research. Feedback on my suggestions is requested / welcomed / probably needed.

1. FUDCon Surveys (These could be done onsite or sent out afterwards.)
2. General Improvements Survey - Fedora Community Poll
3. Developer-specific Survey
4. End-user Specific Survey