One of the more compelling activities that falls to marketers is spending inordinate amounts of time analyzing brands that have screwed up. When Toyota accelerators drop to the floor with no warning or Johnson & Johnson recalls 136 million bottles of pills, our desire to understand why these giants stumbled is irresistible. It follows that we also rack our brains studying brands that deliver hit after hit—why, for instance, more bloggers wrote about the iPad than the presidential election. But what happens when a brand that often disappoints suddenly delivers a winner?
That’s exactly what Microsoft did late last year. While Apple was getting terabytes of mobile-media attention for the iPhone 4, Microsoft introduced the Windows Phone 7, a smartphone to rival both the iPhone and Android systems. And while Windows’ 7 may not have turned as many heads as Apple’s 4, it showed us something we don’t often see from the fine folks in Redmond—genuine consumer insight.
Despite the fact that today’s teens seem content to spend every waking moment with their phones, most of us ordinary humans just want a quick check of e- and voice mail. With their immersive phone platforms, Google and Apple seem unaware of this silent majority, this large and untapped audience. But with its latest phone, Windows made a grab for it. In the process, it’s added something unique to the category: a different archetype for the smart-phone itself.
The launch campaign for the Microsoft Windows 7 phone features a range of executions, all crisply driving home the same point: Life is what you’re missing when your nose is stuck to your phone. One memorable TV spot showed people engrossed in their phones while showering, jogging and bicycling—with the inevitably messy consequences. Given Microsoft’s $100 million media budget, it’s not what I’d call a small launch, but remember, these are also the people who dropped $500 million launching the controversy-plagued Windows Vista.
Windows Phone 7’s positioning owes itself to an unusual creative spark: Microsoft chief strategy officer David Webster’s passing glance at the November 2, 2009 cover of The New Yorker (the 86-year-old magazine that’s about as old media as you can get). The illustration depicts a group of white-masked children out trick-or-treating while their parents look equally ghoulish with their faces bathed in the reflective glow of cell phone screens.
“There was this incredible cultural moment,” Webster told me, recalling the incident. “We were becoming lost in our mobile devices, and no brand was addressing that problem. It was a great example of a product truth lining up with a cultural truth.” The numbers bear him out: 49 percent of people admit to having walked into something because their faces were buried in their digital devices, according to a study by Harris Interactive.
Which brings us to the weakness in Microsoft’s strategy: the Windows brand itself. For most consumers, their mobile phone is an appliance. It has to work just as reliably as a toaster. This is doubly true for the ordinary folks who don’t want to geek out with an iPhone or an Android. They’re not early adopters. And there’s the rub. Windows has (sorry, Microsoft) never worked as well as a toaster. Add in the historical baggage of Windows Vista, and you have to wonder why Microsoft went this route.
An unscientific survey of professional marketers on the LinkedIn Discussion Group “What Were They Thinking: A Branding Forum” reveals just about what you’d expect: appreciation for the great advertising campaign coupled with a lot of skepticism as to whether the phone will actually deliver. One brand strategy director went so far as to say, “The idea of positioning a phone as an antidote to phones is definitely different, and I agree that it is based on a real insight. However, it’s unclear to me how this phone delivers against the idea—in fact, I don’t think that it does.” Thing is, the guy admitted he had not yet seen the phone. Clearly, there’s still much skepticism based solely on the Windows brand.
So why did Microsoft put the Windows name on a mobile phone? I’d argue that Microsoft is trying to migrate the brand architecture of Windows itself. The new phone platform and Windows Live are important components of the larger strategy. Webster also told me, “We’re sitting at the point of maximum discontinuity right now”—a gutsy call, but it puts the new phone platform at a disadvantage. Ultimately, the risk of adding the Windows name to a good phone with a great marketing campaign tells us more about the nature of corporations than the brand itself. Sometimes risks must be taken for the greater good.
