In general it’s hard to find much fault in Apple’s approach to marketing – it’s worked pretty well for them, after all – but they’re certainly not afraid to turn the hyperbole dial up to 11. If I were them, I might have saved terms like “magical” and “revolutionary” for when they release products like the iLevitate and iCanTurnInvisible in 2013.
Note: this is the latest in a very slow-moving (the last post was in September) series about Mozilla.com.
When we were redesigning Mozilla.com for the Firefox 3 release, our primary goal for the site was to drive Firefox downloads, but a very strong secondary goal was to do a better job of communicating the rather unique and unconventional nature of Mozilla in general. One way we tried to achieve this was with the fanciful illustrations, but we also created a “What is Mozilla?” page to explain things more directly.
Wiser people than I have been pondering this question for years, and if you asked 200 people in the Mozilla community to answer it you’d probably get 200 different answers, so I won’t claim that this page represents the final word on the subject. But, I’m happy with the way it turned out and hope that it helps laypeople who happen across it understand what we’re all about and why we’re different.
When I was writing it, my big breakthrough was realizing that it made more sense to describe Mozilla as many things all at once rather than as a single concept. From there, I drew upon a bunch of Mitchell’s past blog posts to cover the philosophical details behind the main points. The key line is really the last one: that the goal of all aspects of Mozilla is making the Internet better for everyone.
So, that was the approach to explaining Mozilla to the uninitiated. I should also mention that the page has a very handy side benefit: if you’ve ever struggled to give friends/family/acquaintances a simple answer as to what Mozilla is, how we’re both a non-profit and a corporation, and other fun things like that, just direct them to this page. I’ve used that trick several times now and it makes things much easier!
As Andrew and Seth have already noted, Operation Firefox launched last month with a call for people to submit their plans to publicly display a Firefox Fathead sticker in the most interesting and eye-catching possible (legal) fashion.
We knew the success of this program would depend on whether or not people would rise to the challenge of coming up with great ideas and so far things are looking good: the initial phase of the contest ended last Friday, and we received a grand total of 3200 submissions. Very cool!
From a creative perspective, our goal was to create a website that would fire up people’s imaginations and inspire them to participate. This was a particularly fun project to brainstorm about, as we kicked around inspirational ideas ranging from James Bond to the A-Team. For the design, we turned to our friends at Nobox, and they made the astute call that site should resemble the secret hideout of an underground resistance movement rather than the slick style of a 007 HQ…hence the basement shadows and hand-sketched mission plans. It was also very important that every last bit of site text support this concept, so we worked with Elise Allen, who managed to incorporate influences from Fight Club to Flash Mobs into her copy.
The finalists have until December 3rd to execute their plans, and the winners will be announced shortly afterwards. All 50 Fatheads have been shipped to the finalists, so keep an eye out for giant Firefox logos popping up in strange locations over the next few weeks!
On Tuesday we launched Firefox Campus Edition, a new version of Firefox 2 bundled with a few student-friendly add-ons (for the full details and backstory, check out Paul Kim’s blog).
We worked with our friends at Nobox to help brand the Campus Edition with a look & feel that would be suitably youthful without it feeling forced. They did a great job creating a bulletin board-style landing page (shown below) and a very eye-catching logo treatment.
For the copy, I had the idea of a tongue-in-cheek headline that placed the Campus Edition in the pantheon of essential college items, and since I’m way past the point of knowing this stuff for myself anymore, I drew on the expertise of Sarah Arora and the rest of the Mozilla summer interns for specifics. They provided a lot of great suggestions, and we settled on ramen noodles and shower shoes as the items mentioned on the landing page and back-to-school postcard, respectively.
I should also mention that we’re in the process of creating a Campus Edition poster, so if you’re a fan of this design check back here next week for instructions on how to get the high-res download. And if you’re recently back in school, or are heading there soon, send your friends here!
There are many facets to Mozilla marketing, but one of our biggest objectives is very straightforward: convince people to download Firefox. Since the vast majority of Firefox downloads come from getfirefox.com, we naturally want that page to be as strong as possible.
The general feeling here is that the current version of the page isn’t as effective as it could be, so David “The Professor” Rolnitzky and I have been working on optimizing it. Step 1 is some A-B testing, meaning we will serve up alternate versions of this page and see which one does the best job of getting people to click that big download button. Assuming the results are conclusive, step 2 will be to implement the “winner” as the new getfirefox.com. The Professor also hopes to introduce multivariate testing in the near future, so we can be even more sophisticated in our methodology (that’s really his area, though)…refining these pages will be an ongoing process.
The test versions will be going live soon so I wanted to share them with you guys (comments and feedback are welcome, as always). There are also other subtle variations to what’s shown here, but this is a good overview…be sure to click on each image for a larger version so you can read the copy, as that’s an important part of the testing strategy. As you read, keep in mind that these are aimed at mainstream web users who may not be that familiar with Firefox.
Enjoy!
The current getfirefox.com:
Test version #1:
Test version #2:
Lastly, thanks to Huggybite Design and Active Ingredients for their design work on the various options.
