The Launch and Marketing of Microsoft Vista

The
"Good" – developing and executing the marketing plan for one of the
biggest new product introductions in history … WOW 😉

I
attended an interesting presentation about how Microsoft launched Vista and Office 2007. John Roskill, Microsoft’s US
Business and Marketing Officer gave an overview of the marketing plan (audio,
video and slides can be found here).  As you can imagine with a launch of
this magnitude the marketing team faced many challenges including:

• Reaching
  and persuading an incredibly wide range of customers from novice consumers to
  developers, IT gurus and business decision makers in the largest enterprises
  and governments. (B2C, B2G, and B2B)
• Covering
  a wide range of product lines with an extremely broad value-proposition
  (Windows Vista, Office desktop, Office System Server, and others).
• Managing
  the timing of multiple staggered launches on a global basis.
• Competing
  against a large and determined group including Apple, Open Office,
  Apache/Linux.
• Overcoming
  the "good enough" mentality of current Windows owners.
• Managing
  a wide array of partners including hardware vendors, software developers,
  systems integrators, VARs and resellers.
• Changing
  market perceptions such as "its been a long time coming" and
  "weak security."

The
launch objectives are similar to what you and I have written in numerous
marketing plans … Ready the channel, Build awareness, Create enthusiastic
advocates, Generate revenue opportunities / sales pipeline, and drive
partner-customer connections.  However, the execution of the plan was
anything but business as usual as they "touched" over 100 million
consumers in less than a month in the U.S. alone and developed 15 million
enthusiastic advocates that spread the message. 

Mr.
Roskill shared great insights on the strategy which are too lengthy to describe
here, but one thing that I took away was the need to move beyond transactional
marketing to relationship marketing.  Microsoft has finally gotten it and
this launch marked their shift from…

• Point
  in Time Marketing to Continuous Conversion
• Single
  Product to Solution Stack
• Hitting
  the Masses to Targeting/Sub-segmenting/Measuring
• Generic
  Call-to-Action to Customized Call-to-Action
• Disconnected
  from Sales to Connected with Sales/Partners/Services
• Offline
  to Online (blogs, wikis, reviews, etc.)

These
are good points to keep in mind as we develop our own marketing plans.
Its easy to stay true to the old way of doing things, especially since
relationship marketing is a lot more work.  But, as professionals we must
continually look for ways to take our game to the next level.  If we
don’t, our competitors will!