Apologies for adding to the wave of "how do we respond to Entourage being on the rocks" threads, and for doing so in such a long-form post, but between some earlier forum comments and watching http://www.ted.com/talks/morgan_spur...ever_sold.html , I've had some trains of thought which may be worth following up on.

I, for one, have never seen any Entourage product advertised anywhere- I bought mine within 48 hours of the first time I saw it reviewed on a tech site. Getting word out would probably do them no end of good. The trouble is to who and how?

1) What is Entourage's market?
2) What is Entourage's "brand"?

It has been posited/reported that they're in the crunch now because they expected education to be their driving market. I can say from the graduate research project that first put me in touch with the iRex iLliad (predecessor to my eDGe) that education is not a market for a startup. For example, "smartboards" aren't a half bad technology, but how many classrooms have them after 5+ years? At the best of times you need to convince all the teachers and administrators in a school system that the tech isn't too big and scary to approach, then wait a few years for the bureaucracy to enact changes. Now more than ever before, k-12 and most public universities don't have any money at all. Unless Entourage can arrange the business case, probably per school district, that "look, we've seen your curriculum and met with your publishers, and if you buy each student an EE/PE and go all-digital on your textbooks and handouts you will save x% of your budget" (for x>~20), I don't see sales happening. MAYBE they have a case at private universities where professors are fresh, curricula are flexible, and students can be coerced into buying whatever the course requires. But in general, even if education is their market, I propose it really shouldn't be.
They've apparently been trying to garner attention by going to tech trade shows. That's great marketing... if their market is technophiles and early-adopters. First-word did get out, and they got some sales on the early-adopter demographic, but the early-adopter wave is nearing shore if it hasn't already beached, and as has been surmised on other threads, technophiles are going to mainly be interested in the crazy-fast ultra-slim gaming tablets that can be overclocked and hacked to run anything, not a big heavy almost-laptop that is locked into a version and a half behind the latest Android and a processor that is only par for the course. So barring fallacies in my logic, the trade show crowd isn't going to get them much more RoI.
Based on my own experience and what I've read from others here, I'm going to propose something crazy: the SINGLE BEST market for the EE and PE are *drumroll* that really bigly huge swath of "average people." Folks who want a portable internet and reading solution larger than their phone, who can't justify an iPad because of the cost, who are skeptical about the dedicated e-readers because they look too small to read comfortably on and most are grayscale-only, who don't want a Kindle DX because at that size, being limited to only reading and static-content web browsing seems lackluster, who can't justify a full laptop because they don't need more than internet, word processing and reading, and who haven't really contemplated "netbooks" because aren't they just the same as laptops only with a really cramped keyboard?

So- how to get word out to "average people" on a secondhand-worn-out-childrens'-shoe-string budget?
TV is right out. Major print publications ditto. And I don't see sponsorship happening either.
Online video... hasn't obviously brought in excessive sales, but that may be because it never got linked in the right places. Putting together any more videos, particularly ones with a proper advertising angle rather than just tech demo/help, would take writing budget, filming equipment/budget, and post-production budget. Or a few of us stepping forward and doing our own creative spins on youtube and accidentally going viral.
Utilikilts has got a fairly good thing going by word-of-mouth: every kilt ships with a dozen or two business cards in the pocket so when the wearer is out and attracts any kind of attention, he can quickly hand out a reference to where to go for more information and possible purchasing. But Utilikilts is a very-niche inherently attention-grabbing product with a tagline that tells you everything worth knowing about the brand- "We sell freedom."

Which leads this rant to question 2- what is the Entourage "brand?" What does an EE or PE say about itself and it's owner? It's a very practical device, but why, on an emotional level, does someone who has never heard of the company want to suddenly take interest? Word-of-mouth is something we-the-customers are uniquely positioned to do for the company, but having props and a message to organize around would certainly help. Anyone know if Entourage has an established marketing message? Their media kit has everything needed to create materials, as far as I can see, but no actual branding. As an informal challenge, can anyone think of something awesome to say? If we come up with a real gem, and reports of the friendliness of the company are true, I'd imagine we could get corporate blessing to distribute our own material in their name