Mozilla Firefox makes up for 22.51% of the market, and is the second most popular browser behind Microsoft Internet Explorer. I, personally have been using Mozilla Firefox for about five years now. I don't truly recall when I started using the program, but I know why. It was, and continues to be very simple to use. Also, I didn't have to worry about as many annoying toolbars that would just pop up as I experienced with Internet Explorer, and I liked this. But the question remains, how does a browser that has to compete with some of the biggest and most valuable brands in the world succeed and become the second most popular, without using any traditional forms of advertising?
Mozilla Corp. has been very successful using the power of grass roots marketing, which the article points out has recently become the topic of conversation, as Barack Obama's presidential campaign relied heavily on grass roots marketing. Paul Kim, Mozilla's VP of Marketing, was interviewed and spoke about Mozilla's marketing efforts. They are as follows:
SpreadFirefox.com
This is the core of Mozilla's marketing efforts, and there are three main components:
- Users can join the community to participate in projects, and they can also communicate with other members of the community via message boards.
- They can become part of an ongoing global project such as "Come up with and execute campaigns around '100% organic software' messaging"
- They can help spread the word. This allows them to join the Firefox affiliate program by posting buttons.
Mozilla Labs
Mozilla Labs is a very interesting community that people can become a part of. It allows members to preview, play with, and provide feedback of new features. The fun part of this is that it allows users to provide feedback to the team working on new programs and features, and really allows a user to become part of the process.
Mozilla's Community Store
This site allows members to submit a Firefox T-shirt design, submit it to the site, and browse from the 124 user submitted available designs to purchase.
Mozilla Campus Reps
A big part of Mozilla's early success was their strategy to target and reach out to college students. They created a campus reps program which helped with word of mouth marketing as well as popular college mediums such as Facebook and Twitter.
FastestFirefox.com
To help launch Firefox 3.5 , Firefox launched this site with was meant to solicit user created videos. It allows people to have their own video posted, as well as serving to be a very creative way to market the product.
Mozilla also has future plans to continue the grass roots marketing that has proved to be so successful for them. As you can see by the explanations above, almost all of Mozilla's marketing is to encourage participation from the online community. Their marketing is focused on bringing their consumer into their brand, and creating a feeling ownership. All of this obviously creates strong brand loyalty, and goes along with the brand image Mozilla was striving for from Day one, when they created their open-source browser. They want the consumer to feel a connection with the product and company, whether it is viewing the source on how they created the product, or giving personal opinions on how they can improve the product.
In this day and age when internet marketing is so crucial to a company's success, Mozilla seems to be doing everything right. Their marketing team realizes that banner ads and the traditional advertisting methods are no longer working like they once were, and it seems as though they figured this out long before the competition has.
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