Talk:Marketing

Introduction

We want:

• Monetary support. Doable over the internet.
• Scientific and technical know-how support. Doable over the internet.
• "Come over to our farm" support. Could benefit from monetary support.
• A bunch of people to try this on themselves in their own place. Some will become developers, but many will become the all important beta-testers: people who try to use this stuff themselves, finding bugs and reporting back to the developer community.
  • Either as some specific project, like students in mechanical engineering who make a CEB machine.
  • Or as part of their complete project, like permaculturalists who want to use the Sun's energy.

It looks like we're looking for target markets in two ways: looking for specific examples, and looking for categories. Both approaches should reinforce each other. At the end of the day, we want a number of groups to focus "marketing" (conversation, information flow, cooperation with) on.

Possible people to try contacting

Rationale: People that are aware of the political/criminal/economic system may be more inclined to take action to form a counter-system. The more well informed they are the better they may be able to analyze the situation to see a way to act. People that have already taken some form of action might be more willing to help out.

• http://www.reevismountain.org/ sustainable survival classes natural building

• http://solari.com/blog/?p=2060 Catherine Austin Fitts' blog. Talks of permaculture and local communities.

• http://mikeruppert.blogspot.com/ http://fromthewilderness.com Mike Ruppert. Wrote a fairly well read book, "Crossing the Rubicon", about peak oil and the political/criminal/economic system and ended with a call for action, to local sustainable economies/activism. Informed, good analyst.

• http://farmlet.co.nz/ Rebecca: rebecca at farmlet dot co dot nz A farm in New Zealand. Kevin runs http://cryptogon.com/ about political/criminal/economic news, has links to gardening and permaculture. Very well informed, very good analyst, very practical, has acted on knowledge as have some readers.

• http://dailypaul.com/ http://ronpaulforums.com/ Support local activism, many well informed people, some have taken action.

• http://survivalblog.com/ Wrote a book. Supports self sufficiency, informed, has taken action as have many readers.

• http://infowars.com/ Very many well informed people, not much real action though.

• http://polyfacefarms.com

• http://www.pathtofreedom.com/ Suburban food gardening.

• http://www.chrismartenson.com/ Has a video course to help inform people, has a forum that may have some well informed people.

• http://anationoffarmers.com/ Book about promoting local/urban/suburban (subsistence?) gardening (?)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bates "an influential figure in the intentional community and ecovillage movements."

Crossing the chasm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

There are innovators, early adopters and the rest of us. I haven't read the book "crossing the chasm" but apparently the best strategy is to focus on just one group of early adopters, as the British did with Normandy, because after that the rest is easier.

(Actually, the pictures in the above wikipedia page show how the chasm is between early adopters and the rest. I don't know if the same principles apply to this very early stage.)

Now, such a group doesn't exist "per se", but has to be "defined in our perception". Apparently, it's best to focus on those who need an urgent problem solved, a bad itch to scratch. Some possible alternatives would include:

• people who love to play around with the machines. Tinkerers. Innovators in close fields who'll take your piece as part of their puzzles.
• people who need to get stuff done now, and who already have unsatisfying solutions. Firefighters in need of a better hose. The LifeTrac etc would be competing for light in an area where growth is already happening.
• Others. It doesn't matter if our "categories" overlap, because we're not trying to classify, but rather to freshen our perception to find a few Normandy candidates. So please *add* to this list, rather than remake it. Maybe create other lists, slicing reality in a different way.

One interesting feature of targets is "whom can we serve"? If work can be carried out to develop the products to fulfill their needs, then we're "serving" them, while there's motion towards replicability, and everybody involved learns a lot.