Originally Published:  September 2008

This week’s Spot is about Microsoft and making sense of their recent, publicity generating teaser campaign with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. After years of being the ‘PC guy’ on Apple’s ads and their disappointing $500 million Vista communications launch (part of Microsoft’s largest revenue generator – Windows) Microsoft have decided its time to accept defeat. This move is rare in the information technology market and more so for a leader to admit to how the public actually perceive them. The question for this issue is: Will this work (and what can we learn from this)?

The game has changed since Apple launched its Mac vs. PC ads two years ago, when it was a David and Goliath story. With less than half of Microsoft’s nearly $1billion budget, Apple managed to rebrand Microsoft as ‘a kind of self-conscious and self-absorbed nerd that is out of touch with the normal lives and needs of its users’. With no retort from Microsoft, Apple has made this a Goliath vs. Goliath issue, where they are just as bad as one another, until now. Microsoft is about to make it worse for Apple (and hopefully turn the whole situation around) by embracing the image that was assigned to them through the characters of Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld (others to follow).

Microsoft’s accepting direction is not just prevalent in its communications but is it part of a broader strategy. For example, they are training and creating ‘Window’s Gurus’, similar to ‘Mac Genius’’, in Best Buy dealer outlets in the US; a move almost mocking Apple and putting them in an uncomfortable position. They have reinvented their Vista website making it more usable, created an area where users can upload photos they have taken whilst using their PC’s, and ads through which you can email Bill Gates directly to talk. This shake up is important to watch and learn from, as Microsoft show how a market leader can turn around their image by accepting how they are perceived (not challenging it).

What can be learnt from this?

Basically, you don’t always have to challenge perceptions to win over the market. If a company starts by accepting what their consumers think about them (good or bad) and work to empathize and accept this they will automatically be in a more credible position.