Folks, Microsoft ads might have gotten more sophisticated after this embarrassing first try for Windows 1.0 by their future CEO, Steve Ballmer, but their approach has never really changed!  It’s worth a laugh though!

Microsoft has always talked AT the consumer instead of TO them!  And as we say in Brooklyn: “THAT’S THE PROBLEM!” (Yes, in Brooklyn we say it in all caps!)  To succeed in selling your product, you have to keep marketing in mind.  And keeping marketing in mind means that it’s not about the product you want to sell, but about what your customer actually needs that product to be!  For Microsoft, though, it’s always been about their products end of story and never about their customers.  It’s The Rolling Stones singing the praises of Windows 95 or Madonna serenading later versions!  (For a nice side trip into branding take a look at this account of the Stones’ Windows experience on Gartenberg’s blog for Jupiter Research).  

Here’s the Marketing 101 definition of advertising: Advertising is the nonpersonal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media."(Bovee, 1992, p. 7)

Ah, academia –the good old days!  Let’s take a closer look at that word “persuasive.”  The problem is that Microsoft used advertising to “push their products” instead of reaching the customer’s “need-void.”  To be truly persuasive, a marketer’s got to take the consumer’s needs into account.  And this, my friends, is the key to the marketing concept—satisfying customer needs not simply pushing products – something that Microsoft simply doesn’t get!

What Microsoft got accustomed to over the years was doing business like a utility might do business.  Why?  Here’s a little equation that sums up Microsoft’s “winning” strategy during those years:

BIG ADVERTISING ROLLOUT
+
“PERSUADING” COMPUTER MANUFACTURERS
(TO BUNDLE IN MICROSOFT SOFTWARE OR ELSE!)
–
CONSUMERS’ ACTUAL NEEDS
=
WINDOWS HISTORIC SUCCESS

And it worked!  Here the “persuading” was all being done on the distribution level rather than the customer level.  Customers had no software choice. Their computers came with the software and they didn’t need to be persuaded to make a choice –the choice was already made for them.  So Microsoft’s advertising was more like a golfer yelling ‘fore’ when driving a ball into the crowd or a lumberjack shouting “timber.”  The product was coming whether the consumer liked it or not!!!  But in this case, the consumer couldn’t duck or jump out of the way –but had to learn to live with the glitches, the crashes and the software meltdowns!!! 

Question:  Can a company that uses these types of tactics ever get the marketing concept?   

Times have changed for Microsoft and for the first time in their corporate life, they must deal with something that they have never had to deal with: Competition!  Salesforce.com; Google; Linux; OpenOffice are lining up to take them on!  Oh my, what will they do?  Are they finally going to “get” it?  I doubt it, but some news from Redmond suggests otherwise. 

Bottom line: Microsoft needs to realize that marketing is the new advertising.  Today, advertising alone –even “persuasive” advertising … the kind they’ve never really done anyway— isn’t enough.  Microsoft –and every business these days— needs to reach an ever more scattered group of potential customers with as many creative, active and interactive methods as possible.  Traditional advertising as a way of selling a product is no longer the force it once was! 

If Microsoft is going to prosper (or even survive), it’s going to have to use marketing to recreate the advantage that it once had by distribution alone!  For starters that means that the consumer’s needs are going to have to be put back into the equation if they want to be competitive in the rough and tumble world of marketing!  Oh yes, it’s all very simple when you keep marketing in mind!