[TOS] Notes on the POSSE brand from a convo with brand guru John Adams

[Mel Chua]

I had a great lunch on Tuesday with John Adams from the Red Hat Brand 
team - he's one of the main guys responsible for maintaining Red Hat's
corporate personality and presence, and I was curious about how he'd see 
POSSE as a brand of its own. Notes follow. (I'll work this into a blog 
post as well.)

== Initial questions ==

Before lunch, I'd emailed John with two questions:

# What are the metrics you can use to tell if a brand is healthy - and
is the POSSE brand healthy?
# Where should we be positioning the POSSE brand, and what sort of
next-steps can we take to grow it?

We didn't necessarily follow these questions explicitly, but they set up
the structure of thinking we went into lunch to. John also carried a
printout of our education strategy's "pitch to professors" for the POSSE
Basics class this summer.

== Is POSSE a brand? ==

The first question John asked was whether POSSE was a brand at all (as
opposed to, I suppose, an idea or a product or something that didn't
have its own distinct identity). We decided the answer was yes - POSSE
is talked about as an entity of its own. It's interwoven with things
like Teaching Open Source, Red Hat, etc., but ultimately, POSSE stands
by itself.

== How do users define the brand? ==

After chatting with John, we ended up sifting 3 main things that seemed
like the core of the POSSE brand as I've watched it take shape on the
TOS lists and conversations with professors when visiting schools and
conferences - I'm curious whether they resonate with you.

# '''An open project.''' Open content, open infrastructure, open
decision-making - there's a feedback culture and the program is amenable
to being poked and shaped and guided by whoever's interested; it's not
locked away and only touchable by those on high. Even if most of the
work is done by a very small group of people, the opportunity to
participate as deeply in the building-of-POSSE as one would like is
always there. In short, we try to run POSSE the open source way.
# '''A cultural immersion experience.''' It's not really about software,
technical skill, tools and infrastructure, or process training - those
things show up in POSSE and they're certainly important, but if that's
all folks get out of the workshop, we might as well just write a book
for folks to memorize. What we're trying to transmit in POSSE is a
paradigm, a way of thinking - and we want graduates to be able to
operate independently in open source communities and teach themselves
more by doing along the way. It's the difference between memorizing 1000
Chinese characters for a test and walking through Beijing chatting with
your Chinese friend in broken Mandarin about how to order noodle soup.
# '''Academically legitimate.''' POSSE is something designed to weave
into the existing teaching, publishing, etc. life of a professor - it
should strengthen and enrich things you're already doing, rather than
give you yet another separate project to pile on top of your already
overloaded plate. And it should be recognized by students, colleages,
and administrators as such.

== Brand rocket pitch ==

John described a mad-libs-like exercise the brand group will sometimes
do. How do you fill in the blanks for this sentence?

''POSSE is a ______ that offers _______ to _______ because _______.''

* The first blank is about the arena you define yourself as being part
of. For instance, the Carolina Hurricanes can position their hockey
games in the hockey space, the professional sports space, the
buddy-bonding-event space, the Saturday-night-Raleigh-entertainment
space - and the space they choose determines what their competition is.
Is POSSE...
** A source of real-world classroom projects? (Nah, there are tons of
those; there are easier ways for students to get hands-on experience -
internships, for instance.)
** An opportunity to work with industry? (Nah, see above.)
** A faculty growth and development experience? (Maybe - especially for
faculty interested in getting students to be self-directed learners in a
collaboration-rich environment... it's not quite right yet, but I think
it's closer than the other two.)
** How else would you phrase it?
* The second blank is what you're offering within that arena. Some
options could be to say that POSSE offers...
** an open source cultural immersion?
** a workshop?
** a self-study path?
** a supplementary classroom activity?
** entrance into a community of faculty interested in teaching open source?
** What else - and which ones of these resonate the most with you?
* The third blank is about audience. This one is pretty easy - the
audience of POSSE is academics, faculty members.
* The fourth blank is about "points of differentiation," which I'm still
a little fuzzy on, but my best stab at explaining it is "what, exactly,
makes this offering a great one for the audience in the space we're
working with?" This would be things like:
** turnkey infrastructure
** access to course funding
** ongoing remote modules throughout the school year
** the opportunity to write a book chapter about your course

This is a good thought exercise, especially the first blank - what
''is'' POSSE's competition? I'm curious what people here think.

After reading these notes, Elaine Chapin (also from Red Hat Brand) 
remarked that "the bit about 'entry pathway into teaching open source" 
seemed to jump off the page to me as a well phrased summary of the value 
prop," so perhaps that's something to run with more.

== Measuring and growing a brand ==

Assorted notes, recommendations, and bits of wisdom on how we can think
about branding:

* '''Be consistent. Be consistent. Be consistent.''' Be the same thing,
give the same message, year after year after year. It's going to sound
boring to you first, since you say it over and over - but it's not going
to be boring to your audience.
* '''Think about associations with other brands''' and both the good and
bad things they bring to the table.
** Teaching Open Source - a neutral, academically-oriented space - which
is great - but also not a very strong brand... it's never really been
defined, and not a lot of folks outside the TOS community will recognize
it.
** Red Hat - on the up side, this association adds plenty of credibility
and weight since Red Hat is a Real Company and an open source thought
leader and such with a strong brand; on the down side, POSSE could also
be seen as corporate manipulation, Red Hat's marketing mouthpiece, and
"tainted" with profit-thinking and non-neutrality. (John and I talked
about POSSE being "a Red Hat community service" as a good positioning
for this - it's a gift we give, and part of giving a gift is letting it
go and not controlling it.)
** ...and so forth.
* '''Three things to measure.''' This can be done formally if you like,
but also informally.
** Awareness. Does your intended user base know about it? (This depends
on the space you choose to position the brand within - for instance, if
the space is "faculty workshop," how many professors would name "POSSE"
on a list of faculty workshops? If you reminded them about POSSE, how
many would go "oh yeah, POSSE, I've heard of that before!"?)
** Consideration. If they know about it, would they actually try it? Is
it appealing? ("I've heard of POSSE but I'd never go to one..." or "now
that you describe it, I'd love to do that"?)
** Loyalty. How likely are people willing to switch to the competition?
(What's the competition?)

== Quick assessment: how are we doing? ==

Quite well. The POSSE brand seems on track for the things we'd like to
do with it (provide professors with an entry pathway into teaching open
source). Yay! We're doing things right!

== What's next? ==

Suggested next-actions to build and clarify our brand-fu a bit more:

# Fill in the mad libs exercise - the hardest part will be "what space
are we playing in?"
# Come up with simple ways to measure the three health metrics
(awareness, consideration, and loyalty) informally at SIGCSE.
# Decide if there's anything about the branding we want to change, and
make those changes now, early on - if we need a logo refresh, a font
choice, etc. we should do that before we have thousands of people
spreading our old stuff around! Mel will continue to talk with designers
about this and keep the TOS community in the loop.