New Rules of Marketing and PR | Public Relations | Case Studies | Marketing | Best Practices
In technology businesses, the biggest companies are rather arrogant when it comes to marketing, aren't they? For years, marketing at big tech companies like Microsoft has been about letting customers know when the new product release is ready and then sitting back and taking orders.
How fascinating it is for me to see that Microsoft has identified that the egocentric, big brother, product-focused marketing of the past doesn’t work anymore! Wow. Microsoft was always my poster child for the "you will like it because Microsoft made it" approach to technology marketing. Now they are investing in marketing that focuses on the customer first. Holy cow. Microsoft, the most product oriented company out there is now becoming customer oriented in their marketing approach.
In a fascinating article called On the Campaign Trail in Redmond Channel Partner Online the details of Microsoft’s new customer campaigns are spelled out. According to the article, the Microsoft customer campaigns are based on customer aspirations like "drive business performance" and "enable your mobile workforce."
In the past, Microsoft had product oriented "go-to-markets" that were based on what Microsoft wanted to sell. Now they focus on customer campaigns that focus on market problems and what customers want to buy. That's a huge change.
The reinvention of Microsoft marketing has been an ongoing effort for several years. In a terrific June 2005 article by Rob O'Regan, Editor in Chief of the late, great CMO Magazine (sadly, this article is no longer available online), Mich Mathews, Microsoft's senior vice president of corporate marketing, said that the process to become customer focused will take ten years. "I know that sounds like an incredible amount of time, but when you’re a company of 57,000 people and still very much an engineering culture, you can't have some corporate mandate and expect everyone to dance to it."
In a sidebar article called Under the Hood, Mathews said: "The area that we are investing in like crazy is around relationship marketing: the systems, tools and processes that allow us to have an ongoing conversation with our customers. The area around this that excites me the most is Microsoft.com. We are the second most visited website on the planet. And those are the people every day who are coming to say, 'Hey I’m interested in you.' It’s just the most amazing magnet. We’re just scratching the surface in using Microsoft.com as that relationship engine."
This is all heady stuff. The dinosaur is morphing in order to survive for many years to come. I've been a marketer for 20 years. When I had a "real job" as VP Marketing at various public companies, I always worked for the smaller guy, the scrappy competitor that had to be smarter at marketing and PR than the dinosaur at the top. Now I write and consult about the new rules of marketing and PR as well as teach the Pragmatic Marketing Effective Product Marketing course to help companies to compete against the big guy. But it’s weird when the big guy begins to "get it" and acts a less like a dinosaur…
