Influx

Mozilla, the folks behind Firefox are at the forefront of 2.0 marketing. They rely on their community to build and market their products and have done some amazing things by taping into their base. Here’s a short interview with Paul Kim, VP Marketing, Mozilla Corporation, who explains more.

1. Briefly describe your position?

I’m the VP of marketing for Mozilla Corp.

We work as part of a global open source project to make Firefox.

Mostly, I try to stay out of the way of an inspired team of marketers working in partnership with a worldwide community to spread the word about Firefox.

2. What, in your opinion, has changed for brands in the 2.0 world?

The poles that immediately jumped to mind for me are “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” and “Line Rider”.

Classic branding reached a kind of apex in 1971 with the Coca-Cola “Hilltop” ad –

“Hilltop” rolls up multiple strands of an era that is receding for brands: concentration of audience and attention, advertising as entertainment, and implicit upleveling of professionalism over word of mouth.

I can’t think of a better counter and illustration of the structural changes 2.0 has introduced than “Line Rider”. A Flash-based physics experiment spreads through the global network to spawn a subnet of participant generated content, a commercial enterprise, and a 2.0 brand sui generis.

- 25K Line Rider videos

The core of 2.0 is continuous, realtime and actionable feedback loops.

As the pre-2.0 lag between idea and response shrinks, we’ll see the rise of unpredictable, resonant brands that validate themselves not through multi-million dollar traditional campaigns, but through the trackable, grassroots support of individual humans, enstatiated on the web.

3. What have been Mozilla’s most interesting marketing efforts and why do you think they worked?

There is a line from the launch of Firefox to today that rests on co-opting traditional marketing models and opening them up to participation by our community.

The three campaigns that come to mind:

New York Times Ad. 10,000 Mozilla community members donate over $250,000 in a week to fund New York Times ad to launch Firefox 1.0

Firefox Flicks. A contest to deliver community generated 30-second ads for Firefox (inspired in part by MoveOn’s Bush in 30 Seconds contest and Butler Shine’s Converse UGC campaign). Over 250 submissions; tens of millions of views on video nets.

Download Day. Rallied the Mozilla community to drive awareness for the launch of Firefox 3 with a campaign to set a new Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a single day. Exceeded our goal of 5M downloads with a final tally of 8M. Campaign lived on the web, was global, and provided a satisfying mechanism for individual participation in a collective effort.

4. How can old school brands become more 2.0?

Listen, share, adapt, be open and give back.

At the edges, reimagine your business down to its DNA (for much, much
more on this topic, read Umair Haque at http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/

5. How do expect the economy to impact people’s relationship to brands?

My hope is that the current economic environment, as fleeting as it may be, reinforces the need for sustainable living.

How this filter influences brand relationships isn’t clear to me yet.

I’m optimistic about a rebalancing in the relationship and interaction between human and brand(s) in the years still to come.

Posted by Ed Cotton