Looks Like They Forgot To Add Marketing

Microsoft has been a marketing focused company for most of its history. Independent of the merits of its products, it has often excelled in both marketing strategy and tactics. It is hardly a coincidence that its current CEO, Steve Ballmer, began his career at Proctor and Gamble. Thus it seems particularly puzzling that for its latest and most ambitious product ever – Windows Vista, marketing appears an afterthought. Sales of what Microsoft expects to be a blockbuster are off to a slower start then predicted. The Vista products have received mixed reviews, but it’s the marketing that hurts.

Microsoft can commit marketing sins the rest of us cannot get away with, because over 90% of new PCs automatically come with Vista. The marketing opportunity is with the tens of millions of computers running one of the versions older than Vista. When the choice is to stay with the older product for free or pay for Vista, marketing is crucial. So what’s wrong with Vista’s marketing?

Too Many Products With Indistinct Positioning.

Vista is not a single product. It exists in five (count’em 5) versions each at different price points. The products homepage (www.windowsvista.com) is longer on animation than substance. One clicks, waits for icons to dance around the screen, clicks again and gets a paragraph, which claims but neither shows nor convinces why this is for me. These are somewhat ordered on a continuum perhaps from simple to sophisticated or home to business, or clueless to tech-savvy. The positioning is not clear and that’s a problem

Unclear Benefit Proposition.

"Easier, Safer, More Entertaining, Better Connected" says the web site.

This smacks of “new and improved” from the bad old days out of the marketing museum. Want to know more, download the product guide. This guide may need a guide. Depending on its format, it weighs in at from 24 Mb to 61 Mb. The formats are not what computer users have been taught to expect. There is no Word document or Adobe pdf collateral for Vista. Rather the guides come in new proprietary formats, which require you to first download and install viewer software.

Vague Claims and What Seems Like Mere Puffery.

Clicking further does not always yield more information or enlightenment. Consider this description of the Vista Business version. Often hyperbole substitutes for demonstration. Why spend $99.50 for Vista Home Basic when for $ 159.00 or so, you can get Vista Home Premium with an “Elegant Windows Aero desktop experience”. Experience is getting expensive, but I guess you have to be there to appreciate it. The page depicting this is neither elegant nor an experience though it tells us:

"Windows Vista Business is the first Windows operating system designed specifically to meet the needs of small businesses. You'll empower your entire business to work more efficiently …"

Curiously Vista is subordinated on Microsoft’s own home page, not only to the new version of its office software, but even a to a fix for the new onset of daylight saving time. This last, some days after the time change, when you had either manually changed your clock or decided you didn’t care what time your computer claimed was.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is well known and for a businessman fairly recognizable. The site depicts him much younger and with a beatific smile that participants in an informal poll I conducted found unsettling.

Vista may be a fine product, but until Microsoft tells and shows what’s in it for customers and there by return to its roots, sales are likely to lag.

Your Sugar Mama

There are so many bad marketing campaigns, we like to salute one when we find it.

Campaign: Sugar Mama

Sponsor: Virgin Mobile

(http://www.virginmobileusa.com/stuff/sugarmama.do)

Offer: Reward Mobil customers with extra minutes in return for

• Watching online videos
• Receiving text messages
• Filling out surveys

Details: Exactly how program works stated clearly and concisely on a answers page.

Execution: If you still have questions, there is an email address. And someone actually responds to the email with explicit answers within a day.

This is permission marketing as it ought to be. Customers can opt in and opt out at any time. Their participation is acknowledged with a simple token reward – for every minute you view our content, we give you a minute of airtime.

As a rate of pay this is way below minimum wage, but that beside the point. It is an acknowledgement and appreciation of the customer. When is the last time you got that as a consumer?

This straight forward clarity runs throughout. It’s easy to see what you get, what that costs, and what to do if you want to change your plan.

This shouldn’t be a big deal, but compared with the major communications carriers and cable system operators it is. It is the difference between earning customers and trapping them.

Best Practices – Do Not Make Perfect

Many of our clients assume that if a marketing stratagem or tactic is used by a major player it ought to be good. If a small to mid-sized firm can afford to, they’d do well to mount a similar program. “If (fill in the name of a feared or admired organization) does it, why don’t we?”

Consider the following. A major bank and credit card issuer sends multiple envelopes to arrive on the same day. One is a statement and with it the usual detritus of untargeted offers such as those blank checks allowing you to get cash at very high interest. The second package is more of the same, without the statement. Why do major firms clog your physical and electronic inboxes with multiple offers and why do they present the same or similar offers to customers, who over the years have shown no interest?

The cost to print, process, and mail offer, when you have scores of millions of customers is low. The return on those unfortunate folks who, for whatever reason, use those checks is high. Whether these programs have a high or even a positive ROI is tough to tell from outside the organization. Whatever the believed ROI, it is probably exaggerated, because it ignores several costs. These include:

• The cost in time and potential irritation and confusion to the customer of overlapping offers.
• The opportunity cost when customers perceive your company as inept and are less likely to buy other services from you.
• The avoidable waste of communications sent to customers, who by their history, have shown they are not interested in a product.

Of course, we should always be willing to test offers, but the offer above, was dead on arrival. Next time you get a communication from one of the big guys, don’t consider it an example of a best practice. You can do better.

Will The Cat Drool?

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, A currently popular marketing book, makes much of the differences between cats and dogs. Not the obvious differences. Dogs are a metaphor for customers of yore. Cats are the new non-compliant customer. The authors go on to make a specious case that Pavlov, the Russian physiologist of salivation dog fame, is no longer relevant.

Essentially Pavlov showed that merely the (almost) simultaneous pairing of two stimuli results in the learning that these are associated. The classic case is pairing of a sound with food, such that hearing the sound produces salivation. The effect is powerful and ubiquitous and applies to you and me as well as dogs and cats.

So what? You might well ask. Pavlov’s model was and is the prevailing one for marketing communications. A product may have a complex, systematic and rational value proposition, yet most attempts to enlist customers are Pavlovian.

Marketers try to induce interest or favorable perception by pairing the product or brand with something else the prospect perceives favorably or associate its absence with something unfavorable. Favorable stimuli include sex, safety, children, money, admiration, food, affiliation, and domination.

This attempted association or “conditioning” to use Pavlov’s term, is easy to spot in broadcast advertising, but is common in print, direct mail, email and web sites as well as tactics derived from these such as viral marketing campaigns.

Consider this next time you watch the Super Bowl, read a direct mail piece from Dell computer or brows banner ads for on-line gaming.

AOL Is Dead - (Not So) Long Live AOL

AOL was not the first online service though it did predate the commercial Internet. It grew and grew and prospered whereas Compuserv, Prodigy, and numerous others are forgotten.

It was not a technology leader. That was not its value and its market was not technophiles. It was a service, which provided content, connectivity, and community before the Internet and during itsgrowth spurt. Even after the Internet was common, AOL offered a comprehensive service, which attracted and retained tens of millions of users. For millions AOL was the Internet.

What set AOL apart and made it preeminent was marketing. Not hyperbolic like Apple nor solid like IBM, nor memorable in creative or execution. As was said of Coca Cola in its glory days, AOL strategy was to be within an arm’s length of desire.

AOL diskettes and later CDs were in the mail, in magazines, at libraries, convenience stores, and post offices. They included a “free” trial and a competitive price. It was easy to join and not so easy to quit. If you had access to a telephone and $20/month you were in. So were 25 million others, at its zenith, circa 2000.

In the days before standard email addresses, AOL was easily the largest community of online users. An AOL screen name was, like a well known address, something people were reluctant to change. Rather like mobile phone numbers before mandated portability.

What happened? How did so dominant market player loose its market?

AOL was king of dialup and its market allowed it to prevail over competitors with lower prices and different offerings. Dial up is dying and the fortunes of the king declined with his domain.

This leaves AOL with millions of customers and increasingly less to offer them or make them stay. Its portal, content, free email, and other services delivered on an advertising pays the bills model looks, feels and smell sort of like Yahoo, MSN, or a number of others. If it controls costs, witness its recent layoff of 5000, it can survive for quite a while as one of many web media properties. As a key player, it’s gone.

RIP