Yes, I ran a digital marketing company for a few years and have been in the IT business for 25 years (plus coding for 15 years before that).
I created a Hive channel called @strategizer to discuss and share on the topic of marketing Hive, but after putting in a month or so of time towards research and seeking funding to do the job properly, I didn't get much of a response from the key stakeholders in the community and moved on.
Ultimately, the logic being used to direct Hive is flawed and not backed up by coherent logic or data. Truly knowing how to present and market products requires solid research and data driven decisions in place of opinion. This is not available for Hive, so we are only left with opinion. Having created my own social network prior to Steem existing and also having been involved in other social network startups, my view for Hive is that it needs to prioritise it's unique selling points in order to compete. These are censorship resistance and public ownership - which are the two features that are least promoted and even laughed at by key stakeholders here - which is a major red flag for me.
Hmmm. Thanks for the reply. Any chance you would go ahead and implement your ideas without DAO funding?
Carrying out proper market research is a somewhat costly thing to do and I don't have a regular income, so I can't really dedicate that much time to carrying that out. I also don't want to do that when the DHF is specifically for this purpose.
Unfortunately, business growth and marketing are areas that many people think they understand when they do not. It is common for board rooms in corporations to have meetings on this topic and for everyone to have competing views (opinions) and the only way to overcome this is through solid research and data - which is why Hive needs this so desperately.
At some point a trigger has to come to break this or Hive will die - however, it seems that the majority of people with power are developers who simply lack the experience in these areas to know any better.