"Market Research" is perfectly applicable to Open Source projects. In fact, every Open Source project that has convinced volunteers to spend time and effort has a viable business case: people already spend money (read: time) on it. Developing a communication strategy for a lose bunch of open source projects is quite the task. And here's where an alignment for a internal and external communication strategy is deeply lacking. Building trust and expectations for your customers (= the volunteers that spend time and effort) and trust and expectations for your audience (= people who "just use" the software) is the job to be done. It's neither advertising nor market research. But still part of the marketing domain.

Fighting your customers is an old business model. Worked with the native americans, works with music fans. I suspect the great internet wars of 2010