I don’t think the early version of CP needs a tagline. It really has nothing to distinguish itself from WP, and by virtue of that, the WP tagline of “Democratizing publishing” still fits. It is world-class only because its predecessor made it that way.
I doubt you can attract people easily until there is something better here than there. WP has thousands of people using it (therefore testing it), has support forums where real people answer pretty fast, has thousands of plugins and themes with a built-in interface to install. has 16 years of exposure and name recognition with tutorials and host install scripts and wordpress.com, has meetups and events, has worldwide participation in contributing. I say take advantage of that while the products are so similar.
Personally, I’m only here because I don’t like the WP roadmap. But looking at the CP roadmap, I don’t see much to attract me either. So I keep my client sites at WP 4.9. A new client came along and I was hard-pressed to decide between current WP, WP 4.9, or CP. I ended up choosing WP 4.9 because of ease with integration (and the editor and the recovery mode, etc.)
Yes, waiting for V2 before rebranding does make sense, so +1 for that.
I’m not entirely convinced by this “friendly community” angle though. When I’ve chosen a CMS for a project in the past, “How friendly is the community” is not a factor I have ever considered.
The tagline came out of a discussion, and ultimately a decision, about who we wanted to target. I was one who argued that targeting business users would take CP in a more professional, more robust direction as a CMS. That said, I’m not sure that was the best place from which to derive a tagline,
While the CP community IS great, I don’t believe many professional users are likely to switch because they like our community better. Most pro users are going to base that decision on things like technical and security issues, the availability of themes and plugins, and the viability of CP itself.
I would love to see us find a tagline that characterizes CP as the CMS with ‘chutzpah’, or some other characteristic that professional users can identify with.
Unfortunately, “Latest commit … on 4 Apr” neutralizes any difference.
Maybe we pay too much attention to that marketing details? It feels like drowning in branding, positioning, philosophy, mission and other packaging stuff, but haveing no real value to offer to clients. I think that tagline is not the real bottleneck. Wordplaying won’t lead to any dramatic changes in CPs popularity. But an impressive list of improvements (towards WP) can do it easily even if tagline is not exact. Removing customers pain is much more important than particular words.
My 25+ years in marketing tell me, that you are right in many aspect:
Especially this:
My opinion - this is marketing + credibility issue. Marketing issue is obvious, credibility is about “will it survive the next 5 years” question. Attracting developers and releasing v2, v3 will help to overcome credibility and spread to the world.
But mass marketing is not the only strategy.
In fact, when starting out with a new service offering, it is generally not the best strategy.
WP’s main focus has always been bloggers.
Some of us just realized that WP could easily be adapted for business use.
The blogging market is always going to be bigger than the business market.
And that is okay…
CP’s stated focus is business.
As time goes by, some bloggers will probably realize (perhaps with a little help from effective marketing campaigns) that CP can easily be adapted for blogging.
But, at least in the beginning, these should be incidental customers and scarce development resources should not be primarily directed at them.
And as someone has stated in a thread somewhere on the forum (too lazy to go and look for it now), business users tend to be more profitable.
With “bloggers” (even businesses who blog), there are generally a few paid accounts that subsidize a great many free accounts in terms of the man-hours and infrastructure required.
With “business” this tends to be somewhat different in that the ratio of paid accounts to free accounts tends to be different.
Business has fundamentally different needs to bloggers.
And v1 (and probably even v2 and v3) won’t convince established business that a hard fork of WP v4 is a viable option.
In order to market successfully to the business market, the WP coding philosophy needs to be flipped on its head first.
Namely, “everything off unless I choose it”, instead of “everything on unless I choose it”.
If CP wants to be a viable value proposition for business, there needs to be more to it than “people who hate Gutenberg”.
I know, what you mean, and I agree on the difference. Just I think that a world “business” should be replaced to something different, without this confusing side effect:
The problem is I don’t know the right word. Meaning “serious”, “business” websites without negative corporate-like touch.