The June issue of Fast Company features a cover story on ultra-hipster ad shop, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, and the company's new $300mm mission to make Microsoft cool. Alex Bogusky, clad in black t-shirt and jeans, gives a confident smile from the magazine's cover looking legitimately cooler than Mac (from the infamous Mac vs. PC ads) himself. If anyone can do it, this guy can. If advertising is the main issue, which, by many accounts, it is. As Danielle Sacks reported in her story, Apple's humorous and popular 2-year-old "Mac vs. PC" campaign has been widely credited by industry analysts with rebranding Microsoft:
Nothing is doing more
to carve away at Microsoft's reputation -- and contribute to its loss of market
share -- than the assault launched by Apple two years ago in the form of the
"Mac vs. PC" spots featuring The Daily Show satirist John Hodgman. The ads became immediate
pop-culture fixtures, spawning more than 1,000 video spoofs on YouTube and
taking home last year's Grand Effie, the ad industry's highest honor for
effectiveness. "Nobody messes with anyone in the tech industry the way
Apple has messed with Microsoft," says Enderle. "It's the first time
I've ever seen a major national campaign that disparages a competitor, and the
competitor just sits back and takes it. If somebody tried to do that to Oracle,
you wouldn't be able to find the body." Gartner media research analyst
Andrew Frank credits Apple -- whose annual media spend is less than half of
Microsoft's nearly $1 billion budget -- with single-handedly rebranding
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."
I would propose that one thing has done more to carve away at Microsoft's reputation and contribute to its loss of market share and that is Microsoft itself. The ads wouldn't strike such a chord if the content didn't contain multiple grains of truth. And those truths can be tracked back to the way Microsoft has chosen to conduct business - releasing Vista when it was buggy and far from ready for prime time and, in some cases, forcing distrusting consumers to make the switch when they purchased new PC's by making Vista the only option. (A major reason we, quite happily now I might add, switched to Macs last summer...) The huge marketing push behind Vista only served to further infuriate customers who felt the company had misled them as to the operating system's benefits, which sorely disappointed when it came to compatibility and ease-of-use.
Apple didn't rebrand Microsoft. They exploited key weaknesses. And rather than addressing those weaknesses, Microsoft, seemingly, has chosen instead to invest millions in creating a new image. But while Microsoft and Bogusky explore new frontiers of cool, Apple has dialed up the heat again. This time by pouring resources into making superior customer service a key element of their marketing and brand. See this Ad Age article to get the details...
Can we expect to see PC kicking Mac to the curb anytime soon? Not unless Microsoft is willing to invest at least an equal amount of capital in making sure their products and service exceed the expectations the market, and this new campaign, will set. At the very least, they should try to meet them.
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