8. Marketing in the customer-participation era Brands Power & Influence Community
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10. Era of Customer-Participation Era of Customer-Participation Digital Marketing At Microsoft Digital Marketing At Microsoft Case Study: Windows 7 Launch Case Study: Windows 7 Launch
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12. “Over 50% of Microsoft’s marketing communications will be delivered via digital channels by 2010” Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft 2007 Association of American Advertising Agencies Conference
15. Era of Customer-Participation Era of Customer-Participation Digital Marketing At Microsoft Digital Marketing At Microsoft Case Study: Windows 7 Launch Case Study: Windows 7 Launch
26. Achieve the highest level of customer satisfaction,advocacy and fastest adoption of any OS ever released Windows 7 launch goals
27. Windows 7 launch strategy 1. Finding Our Voice 4. LaunchNew Version User at the centre 2. Creating an emotional connection 3. Amplify/magnifyvia communities
28. Windows 7 launch strategy 1. Finding Our Voice 4. LaunchNew Version User at the centre 2. Creating an emotional connection 3. Amplify/magnifyvia communities
32. Windows 7 launch strategy 1. Finding Our Voice 4. LaunchNew Version User at the centre 2. Creating an emotional connection 3. Amplify/magnifyvia communities
33. Windows 7 launch strategy 1. Finding Our Voice 4. LaunchNew Version User at the centre 2. Creating an emotional connection 3. Amplify/magnifyvia communities
35. Windows 7 launch strategy 1. Finding Our Voice 4. LaunchNew Version User at the centre 2. Creating an emotional connection 3. Amplify/magnifyvia communities
36. Windows 7 launch strategy 1. Finding Our Voice 4. LaunchNew Version User at the centre 2. Creating an emotional connection 3. Amplify/magnifyvia communities
46. Windows 7 launch strategy 1. Finding Our Voice 4. LaunchNew Version User at the centre 2. Creating an emotional connection 3. Amplify/magnifyvia communities
47. Windows 7 launch strategy 1. Finding Our Voice 4. LaunchNew Version User at the centre 2. Creating an emotional connection 3. Amplify/magnifyvia communities
58. Windows 7 launch strategy 1. Finding Our Voice 4. LaunchNew Version User at the centre 2. Creating an emotional connection 3. Amplify/magnifyvia communities
59. Achieve the highest level of customer satisfaction, advocacy and fastest adoption of any OS ever released Windows 7 launch goals
65. Collaboration Is The New Marketing Model Source: Mohan Sawhney, Kellogg School of Management
66. Six implications for marketing & marketers Listen up! Turn up the volume of your corporate radar Participate! host the community, contribute to the conversation nurture a vocal set of loyal advocates Collaborate! evolve your marketing from broadcast social from marketer-managed integration to user-managed integration Take risks! low barriers to entry, global reach, real-time feedback & optimization Challenge the agency model! blurring media lines (Ad/PR/DM/SM/Online) executions now optimized for UGC personalization and pass-on millions of amateur creative/media directors across the globe Measure! from primary research to digital interactions
Today, I would l;ike to share with you 3 perspectives.First, the way I see the marketing discipline developing over time.Secondly, how we define and approach digital marketing at Microsoft.Third, I’d like to share a case study to demonstrate how we pulled all that together.
Today, I would l;ike to share with you 3 perspectives.First, the way I see the marketing discipline developing over time.Secondly, how we define and approach digital marketing at Microsoft.Third, I’d like to share a case study to demonstrate how we pulled all that together.
When I first entered the marketing profession nearly 25 years ago, in retrospect our industry was very simple.Companies developed and manufactured a product and customers paid us for that product.To drive demand for the product, there were two forma of marketing – “advertising” (in its broadest sense, so including events, shows collateral etc) and PR (earned media in its broadest sense).The press had to maintain a good working relationship with the brand company because they relied upon them as the major source of their information. That is how the PR industry, and PR agencies, started.
3) Global Communications PlatformsThere are hundred of global, free and easy to use platforms by which customers can publish their opinions that have become very popular, very quickly. e.g. Facebook: 500m users
So, if we return to our original diagram again, we can see a number of fundamental challenges to the traditional marketing model.Customers are now connected and organised and they are able t share their opinions with one another on a massive, global scale via blogs, social networks and ratings sites.This means that customers are becoming increasingly less susceptible to “advertising” (in its broadest sense) and value the opinion of strangers more than informative power of the brand.In addition, any journalist can access 1,000 different opinions/perspectives about your product or service simply by using a search engine that has indexed the sites were these opinions are posted.Net-net, from a marketers perspective there has been a fundamental shift in the balance of power and influence from brands to the power of the “community”And, my recommendation is to be successful moving forward marketers need to invest more of their , energy and dollars at the bottom of this slide than at the top.
2) The Connected-ConsumerCustomers can now share and access opinions easily, instantly and globally.They don’t need the brand to “inform” them anymore.
Now I want t to move to my second topic which is hos does Microsoft “do digital”.
Our journey and evolution as a digital marketing practioner has been interesting.We start with one massive advantage. That is 94% of all PCs come pre-installed with our software and that the majority of them are purchased in order to connect with the Internet. That is a major advantage over a brand like Starbucks, B MW or Burger King, for example.So we should be leaders in this area. But 3 years ago we were not. We did not have a strong strategy, infrastructure, expertise or capability in this area.You can debate where we were on this evolutionary mape, but we were certainly not at the homo sapien end of the chart at that time.
Part of making any cultural change is setting clear goals that change people’s perceptions and behaviours.This statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was an important one and, I am pleased to report is a target we have met and exceeded.
Nowadays, when thinking about planning and executing a digital marketing campaign, we think in terms of 3 networks:PAID MEDIA. This is simply buying digital media space on other organizations networks.OWNED AND OPERATED MEDIA: This is media we own. It might be as simple a newsletter list, a website, a blog or (in the case of Microsoft) can be a fully-fledged media network in its own right. EARNED MEDIA: This is simply digital PR. This is media that is not paid for, but you “earn”. You do this by creating content of value e.g. a blog post, viral video etc that other choose to pass onto their social media community. Note the symbiotic relationship between the different types of media. The overall strategy is clearly to drive the paid and earned media audiences over to your owned and operated platforms.
Now I would like to share with you some of the concepts I have described using a real-life case study from right here in Asia.
Windows is a product that needs no introduction, but since I have a largely captive audience, I’ll take the liberty of providing one
That said, at the time this case study (18 months ago) all was not well in the world of Windows.The product was delayed – 5 years in the waiting – and this raised expectations to an unprecedented level. It would be true to say that it did not meet customer expectations in all areas and the adoption was slower than normal.
So that is the challenging context into which we launched a new version – Windows 7 – into the market in November 2009.There are many reasons why Vista was not the success we all hoped, but one of the primary ones was that we lost some focus on the user-experience.So we decided to focus in an unprecedented way on the user and place them at the heart of every aspect of this product – design, development, testing, distribution, advertising, marketing, launch.
In launching Windows 7, we set 3 simple, but ambitious goals for the product.
One of the challenges with launching new software is that it is a long and – naturally – public process. So you still have to “live” with the existing product (in our case Vista) while we brought Windows 7 to the market.
One of the challenges with launching new software is that it is a long and – naturally – public process. So you still have to “live” with the existing product (in our case Vista) while we brought Windows 7 to the market.
The first thing that we wanted to do was to “find our voice”.Although, Windows is chosen by users 94 out of 100 times when selecting a personal computer, because we were the de facto standard our users were not always as vocal as Apple’s. You saw earlier that Apple have a small , but loyal and vocal, group of users.Ironically, this advertising campaign by Apple provided us with the inspiration for us finding our voice.Firstly, it deliberately stereotypes Windows users as Bill Gates-like nerds and “losers:”.Secondly, in reality, it ‘s two highly-pad actors simply playing out a script. They do not portray real people.We wondered whether the 1bn users of Windows around the world where really like this advertisement? Or are they an extremely rich and diverse group of individual using Windows to solve the challenges of everyday life?And would it be better to show real customers using Windows in real situations.
So this is the commercial we created.It was called “I’m a PC”.
We also asked the 1bn users to post their videos of how they were using Windows in their lives. Over 100,000 Windows users across the world did so.We had found our “voice”.
One of the challenges with launching new software is that it is a long and – naturally – public process. So you still have to “live” with the existing product (in our case Vista) while we brought Windows 7 to the market.
One of the challenges with launching new software is that it is a long and – naturally – public process. So you still have to “live” with the existing product (in our case Vista) while we brought Windows 7 to the market.
Again, three things to note:The emotional connection has been made.We are placing the user – in this case a child – at the centre of our communication effort.3) It’s a real child, not a child-actor (unlike Apple).
One of the challenges with launching new software is that it is a long and – naturally – public process. So you still have to “live” with the existing product (in our case Vista) while we brought Windows 7 to the market.
One of the challenges with launching new software is that it is a long and – naturally – public process. So you still have to “live” with the existing product (in our case Vista) while we brought Windows 7 to the market.
That commitment to placing the user at the centre of what we do, started before we even shipped the product.Windows 7 is the most thoroughly-tested operating system in the history of computing worth over 8 million downloading the free beta to try it. The largest every beta we had done before was 1 million.
This is the Looking Glass dashboard.
Online bloggers, like journalists, need to be segmented to make sure that our limited resources are used in the most effective way.Looking Glass allows us to identify bloggers that have significant influence – either by their reach or profile of their audience – and individually address their comments.
As you can appreciate, given the footprint of Windows in the market, the amount of online commentary being made at launch time is huge. One challenge we have is how to monitor, capture, aggregate and make sense of what is being said.One internal tool we have developed is Microsoft “Looking Glass” that captures commentary, taxonomizes and aggregates it and then enables us to respond to it, either individually or in a broader way.
Most bloggers/sites, however, do not fall into that category.For these bloggers/sites, we use Looking Glass to aggregate the issues and then to create content and publish them via our own “owned and operated” media.This is something that any company can do and all companies must do moving forward i.e. listen, identify the issues, create their own content to address them and publish via their own media. The community will then ensure that content is retweeeted, favourited etc.
One of the challenges with launching new software is that it is a long and – naturally – public process. So you still have to “live” with the existing product (in our case Vista) while we brought Windows 7 to the market.
One of the challenges with launching new software is that it is a long and – naturally – public process. So you still have to “live” with the existing product (in our case Vista) while we brought Windows 7 to the market.
The concept behind the launch campaign was that 1bn users helped us to design Windows 7. Again, this is all about placing the user at the centre of our marketing strategy.
Here is the TV campaign which ran in 22 countries across the globe. Including localized versions here in Asia.
And here is what it looked like in posters, print ads and other TV executions.
Finally, one of the outcomes of Looking Glass implementation was that we were able to dedicate an entire site on Microsoft.com solely to what users were saying – NOT us – about the product.This is a perfect example of what I described at the beginning of this presentations i.e. the community is stronger than the brand.So what we chose to do was simply aggregate and host the 2.9m comments about Windows 7 across the key social media sites like Facebook, Twitter etc – and showcase that content.So much more powerful and credible than us simply saying “Windows 7 is great”
If you click into any user comment, you can go right to the actual tweet of Facebook comment.
This proved so popular, we took it beyond Microsoft.com and onto other social media and traditional media sites.Again, a good example of integrating paid, owned and operated and earned media.
All subsidiaries across the region adopted this approach i.e. showcasing user content and commentary over and above what we had to say about the brand.Here is an example of how Microsoft Singapore executed this campaign locally and I have highlighted how much of the launch campaign website is Microsoft content vs user-generated content.
One unexpected advantage of using the Looking Glass technology is its ability to very quickly identify online sentiment trends.I said we used several children for the TV commercials, but the response to Kylie was off the Richter scale. Incredibly positive So we quickly as ked Kylie back to help us with the launch and produced a very low-cost viral video announcing the launch of Windows 7.Again, unless you have a system for listening to user sentiment in your organization, you will see or be bale to respond, to these opportunities.
One of the challenges with launching new software is that it is a long and – naturally – public process. So you still have to “live” with the existing product (in our case Vista) while we brought Windows 7 to the market.
Now, let’s go back and see if we were successful in our original goals.Here’s a reminder of what they were.Now, clearly we invest a lot tracking each of these in some detail and I am not in a position to share with this audience commercially sensitive information. But I can share with you key trends that are already well-documented and in the public domain.
From a customer satisfaction perspective, Windows 7 has been a tremendous success, enjoying the highest levels of customer satisfaction of any operating system we have shipped.Independent research shows 93% of users of Windows 7 are satisfied or very satisfied with the product. Intel, one of the early adopters of Windows 7, reported that of those employees using Windows 7 today 97% would recommend it to their fellow workers.The reason for these unprecedented satisfaction levels? The 8m beta-testers prior to launching the product made a highly-significant contribution.
Finally, AdWeek produces an annual survey of the most talked about brands online.In 2009, Microsoft was the most talked about brand online and the level of positive commentary was significantly higher than Apple.The survey specifically called out the launch of Windows 7 as a major contributory factor to Microsoft achieving this status.
Finally, lets look at customer adoption of Windows 7.It’s actually quite easy to monitor this as every time you visit a website, for example, it can record which OS you are using, so the data is very publicly and broadly available.In summary, Windows 7 is the fastest-selling operating system in computing history and is currently being adopted at twice the speed of its predecessor.
Overall, we are delighted and humbled by the market response to Windows 7.The key to the marketing success of this launch was placing the user at the centre of our product development, marketing strategy, distribution, advertising, PR, launches etc.This is part of a broader sea-change in marketing strategy that we can observe.
1950-70’s – era of transaction marketing similar to the original diagram I showed you.1980-2000’s – era of “relationship marketing”. Customers were identified as individuals, profiled, targeted individually via direct mail, responses recorded and segmentation, target and messaging defined as a result.21st century – customers are connected to each other. They want to be part of the marketing process itself from design, targeting, distribution etc. Smart companies will participate in an active dialogue with them and their communities.
What does all this mean to us as marketers?The following…..
But most of all, we need to listen, not broadcast.
