I think these are valid questions. But, as I have also had the privilege of working in a company where "brand is god," I can pretty assuredly say that all of this only matters if you are an actual employee. Brand does not have power on the outside and has no say about what people do with the brand unless it violates major copyright law. This being said, companies appreciate when people choose to "advertise" positively for them. It is usually only when defamation occurs that companies go after people.

Tim

What you say is also valid Tim but I've seen exceptions or I wouldn't have raised this and risked irritating Quim in the first place.

But anyway I'm dropping it.

So what exceptions have you seen? Your practical examples might be more useful than anything I say.

As Tim says, one thing is to have company employees messing on its own with corporate identity and brand. Another totally different thing is to have customers excited about your product and brand, using them in a grassroots marketing campaign.

Peter (head of Marketing in Maemo Devices) seems to have a clearly positive opinion about this campaign: http://twitter.com/PeterMaemo/status/4022314357

Honestly, I don't see any problem at all. But if you know more based on real experiences please share them.

My examples are from the past and I would have to look for the details. None involved Nokia, however I do recall that around 2007 there was a big push in Nokia to protect the brand. Hence my concern. Not trying to cause trouble.

Hi Freppas,
I've read the many replies and noticed several slogans proposed. For anyones consideration, here's my proposal:

Maemo: Your final phone.

Now, a slogan is fine. But the key element is how a campaign gives background and meaning to a slogan. (Think of Apple: It's not about fruit at all!)

So loading the slogan could be:
1. After choosing Maemo - you'll never need to go elsewhere to look for a better, more complete phone.
2. A Maemo phone can do anything other phones do. And then some.
3. Anyone can make a Maemo phone entirely personal. You'll never need another gadget to express yourself.

Next, messages are best brought across visually. So here's a proposal:
1. Busy city scene showing flashes of shops, specifically hectic. And on a second movie window (the two window style screen, moving if you like), a peaceful scenes showing Maemo users.
2. Just show of the multitude of applications and the thrilling interface. Convincing by itself.
3. Show several people (nicely segmented over age and so on) and their Maemo devices. Since they will be different (if you show actual devices, not mockup's) the message is carried literally and quite clear.

Hope this helps.
Regards,
Jan-Paul (Netherlands)

I'm surprised this hasn't been brought up yet: one of the most critical events in what got the ball rolling for things like firefox is community funded advertising.

I think there's a huge amount of potential for advertising the N900 on specifically targeted sites (for example), particularly ones with high traffic and geeky demographic. Having a massive non-geek userbase is great, but having a geeky support base to work on apps and be all cult-of-mac like, will make that far more likely to happen.

I propose community funded (donation based) advertising campaigns.

Sounds interesting to me. What kind of advertisement would you be looking for though? If we're looking for "geeks" we could probably tailor it a lot more than the mass-market stuff that Nokia will be making.

Firefox also won a lot due to mouth to mouth marketing, and the fact alternatives were commercial (Opera), X11/*NIX-only (Konqueror), or sucked (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Suite (now called Mozilla Seamonkey)).

Firefox adoption did not occur in one night, and hacking on Gecko and Mozilla Suite was going on for a long, long time until Mozilla realized they wanted/needed a stand-alone web browser without the bloat or tons of other protocols & functions.

Commercial advertisement did not happen much AFAIK, and occured rather after 1.x series.

Meh...

Dutch IT site Tweakers.net had a Q&A with Ari Jaaksi. Headline is: "Nokia: other manufacturers may also use Maemo". See [1].

There is a lot of nonsense, assumptions, half-baked truth put forth in the discussion. People, and not 2, its quite a sentiment, tend to think that 'Nokia is forced to give back anyway because of GPL' hence implying no projects open sourced were from ground up developed. Projects such as Hildon. Jaaksi is also quoted saying 'the GUI is closed source' which is either an unfortunate, inaccurate statement or a sloppy_quote/bad_translation.

Yeah, someone is wrong on the Internet. Well, just saddening...

[1] NL article, EN translation (Google Translate)

Just as a thought - many of the videos we have been putting up as Nokia, featuring the guys behind the N900, have been really well recieved. How about replicating that from the community. If there were videos showing off different community apps, running on the N900, that would definately open peoples' eyes about what is possible and how things can be done differently..

Wait, wait - that made me think of a slogan:

Maemo5 - Done differently (a twist on the 'think differently' slogan of pple)
or - Maemo5 - Do differently

That'd be really useful for basic users to see what diferent apps can do and how to use them (and install, please!) I think that sort of information would make a big difference in interest.