Microsoft Online Marketing - Opinions?

Idol285

Hi guys.

I’m a marketing student and I’ve been given an assignment to assess the online marketing campaign of a high-tech company

The company that was chosen was Microsoft. We would like you to comment on how you feel Microsoft uses the internet to portray their brand

Thanks everyone

condra

Now that you mention it, I can't recall seeing any official Microsoft advertisements or marketing material online, at all, ever.

market myself online

Its a bit difficult to quantify the marketing strategy for such a large company, this is because for a period during the early internet era they almost managed to completely dominate internet access itself with internet explorer as the primary browser platform. Gaining such a reputation that it ended up in an infamous monopoly court case. Since then Internet Explorer reach in the market has diminished.

Since then Microsoft has been the funding and driving force behind a number of major online platforms including bing (which now drives yahoo), and a partnership with facebook. This means that anytime you search on Facebook you are actually participating in a Microsoft marketing exercise.

SO if you are studying their marketing efforts you need to understand what are the markets they are trying to reach, and what are the products they are trying to sell.

Well the list includes:

Bing/yahoo : search market
Facbook partnership : social media market

Offline products include:

xbox : gamers market
office etc : business/home user market
windows : pc market

Ultimately I think any in depth discussion would discover that like all really great companies their marketing efforts are best achieved by market dominance, so when ever a potential customer asks a friend what they use to achieve a result 9 out of 10 will recommend a product from microsoft, and subsequently they become so ubiquitous that they almost dissappear into the intrinsic landscape of the market infrastructure.

link8r

Microsoft have an excellent internet marketing programme and to focus on their attempts at building the main platform for the internet via IE, Hotmail, Passport Office365, MSN etc would be unfair and narrow.

IMO, their sites are very good at and have often been far ahead of other companies (regardless of sector/industry) in the following:

1. Good use of imagery and flash/silverlight
2. Good use of video and offsite content
3. Good use of market research and publishing this
4. Brilliant development of micro and sub-sites. They understand their audiences and own lots and lots of domains
5. Their marketing support for Partners is par excellence - the Microsoft Partner network has to be on of the best online portals and anyone here could sign up and access it if they're pushing different Microsoft Products
6. Their network and local business support for services like Bizspark and similar platforms in Ireland has been, IMO, excellent and far ahead of any direct marketing any other technology company has ever done

market myself online

I stand corrected, thankyou for that link8r