Distilled down to the basics, the goal of the Mozilla marketing department is to help people understand, adopt and continue using Firefox (as a means of supporting Mozilla’s overall mission).

To help achieve that goal, we’ve created a short messaging document (beta version…this is still a work in progress) that covers how we’ll be communicating the benefits of Firefox to the consumer audience (in other words, people who use the Internet regularly for email, shopping, news, etc but aren’t familiar with its technical workings…communicating about Firefox to our technical audience - and I suspect that’s about 95% of the people reading this blog - is an entirely different task, so if these points seem obvious to you, keep that in mind).

Obviously there are dozens of benefits that we could cover, but in the interest of making our communications as tight and to the point as possible, we chose to focus on three main points of differentiation between Firefox and the other guys. Our thinking here is that cool features, like spell check or session restore, don’t stay unique to Firefox for very long, so we wanted to go with topics that we can “own” without them being easily copied or duplicated:

1. Security: Because of well-known problems like identity theft, the issue of online security is very important to most web users. Although no browser is invulnerable, we believe that our open source process makes Firefox the safest way to browse the Internet, and this is a critical message for people to hear.

2. Customization: Many casual web users aren’t really aware of add-ons and all the possibilities they present. So, we want to educate people that web browsing doesn’t have to be a “one size fits all” experience.

3. 100% Organic Software: Working for the public benefit rather than profits is a pretty powerful concept, so want we want people to understand that this is what Firefox is all about. Because the history and structure of Mozilla is, well, a little dense, we like the idea of using this inherently non-technical metaphor to sum up our open source, not-for-profit nature.

This document can best be described as a beta release, and we’ll surely be refining it over time, so your comments and suggestions are encouraged. Even better, put these to the test on your less tech-savvy family/friends/co-workers, etc and share your findings. What are their current perceptions of web browsers? What do they look for when they choose a browser (and do they even know there’s a choice)? And do they find security, customization and 100% organic to be compelling points in favor of Firefox?

If this topic interests you, definitely check out these links:
* The complete Firefox messaging document
* A similar document about Mozilla (rather than just Firefox) explained on Melissa Shapiro’s blog
* Spread Firefox post with more information on both docs

(btw, I’ll be out of the office for about a week and a half starting tomorrow, so if you have questions, thoughts or comments about any of this just post them here and we can discuss further when I return)