Haavard and Daniel are engaged in some really good browser marketing discussions at their respective blogs. It's worth reading those threads to see how a big* company like Opera takes up the challenge of expanding product reach.
One thing that stands out to me in the comments there is that many of the participants in that discussion have an incomplete picture of marketing, often reducing it to just one of its many components -- advertising, or public relations, or branding, etc. Daniel's post does a pretty good job in pointing out how varied the activities and required expertise can be. Thanks, Daniel!
While reading through the posts and comments, though, something else struck me. Could Opera's name be hurting their efforts? It's a fine name and I'm not dissing it or anything like that, but it does mean that Opera has to share the search space with an entirely different category of content.
While Opera Software does hold the top spot for a search on "opera", the number 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 SERP spots are for "opera" the art form. It's even worse when you search news and blogs where the overwhelming majority of the articles and posts are about the art form and not the browser. I think it would be a nightmare just to try to track what the news and blogs were saying about Opera (something I do for Firefox,) given how noisy the results would be.
In my experience, building the browser turns out not to be the hardest part. It's reaching out to potential users and convincing them that they should learn more about your offering and showing them how to get it, try it out, and hopefully stay with it. For a product like a browser, where most people get it via the Web, being easy to find and distinct from the rest of the Web's "noise" seems pretty important to me. A new name could come with a fresh new logo, too. I don't know anything about the Opera logo, but the Firefox logo has been a real strong awareness driver on the web.
It is pretty cool, though, to see Opera reaching out to get this kind of feedback from the Opera community. I'm an occasional Opera user myself and for some time was a rabid Opera promoter (I even had Opera 3 banners on my site back in 1998 ;-) and I'm always happy to give feedback.
*Haavard says they don't have deep pockets but Opera has distribution, sales, and marketing personnel in the hundreds. While the "Desktop" team may not be that big, Opera Software is about four times the size of Mozilla today.
late update: Oh, and bring back Opera Man! He was awesome. Much cooler than these guys (yes, even the dungeon master w3c advocate.)
