This is the final installment in a 10 part blog on Microsoft as a practitioner of asymmetric marketing.
10. Brand Warfare
In the post-bubble, post-9.11 period, more than a few brands have been hit hard by crises of ‘reputation’ that, if not dealt with effectively, lead to a loss of brand loyalty and brand value. While each of these cases is unique (Martha Stewart’s insider trading scandal, Enron’s collapse based on it’s off-balance sheet accounting model, and Andersen Consulting implosion based on their association with Enron) they point to the fact that brand and reputation are joined at the hip and that asymmetric marketers need to implement brand warfare strategy that assists them in coping with reputation crises. In today’s sandstorm economy, even a CEO dismissal or revenue restatement can effectively harm a brand, e.g. Computer Associates or Nortel.
Which brings us to Microsoft. Since the mid-90s, Microsoft has experienced wave upon wave of reputation attacks (the DOJ proceedings, the State proceedings, the Sun lawsuit) while scores of anti-Microsoft websites call Bill Gates everything from the anti-Christ to Barney the Purple Dinosaur. There is even an anti-Microsoft webring that will link to and provide traffic for any website that is created to attack Microsoft’s reputation.
Despite these attacks, Microsoft has continued to maintain high brand positives as expressed in both brand value and brand contribution to market capitalization. How can this possibly be if the company’s ethics and leader are under constant blistering attack?
Microsoft understands that an asymmetric market leader must always defend its reputation and so must pay close attention to brand warfare on a 24/7 basis. Microsoft is a true ‘brass knuckles brand’ that must defend it’s reputation in any market circumstance. The company has in fact ‘grown up’ with conflict as the norm (dating back to it’s first regime change action against IBM for control of the PC standard) and has learned to cope.
While Microsoft employs many best practices in brand warfare, my favorite is their recent emphasis on what legendary asymmetric warrior Sun Tzu called ‘formlessness’. In the domain of brand warfare, formlessness means focusing on brand intangibles that make it more difficult for attacks on your company's reputation to succeed with customers and target audiences. Here’s 3 examples.
Formlessness as Defense: When Microsoft is attacked by competitors (or government agencies acting on behalf of their competitors) they defend their asymmetric marketing strategy (including category regime change, customer lock-in, and competitor lock-out) by simply and repeatedly stating that they must retain the right to ‘innovate’ on behalf of their customers. Innovation is a powerful intangible (almost archetypal) theme that will ‘hold’ almost any content you want to project on to it. In fact you might say that innovation as a concept is now the spiritual DNA of both US and western civilization (and has been adopted by China, India, Russia and others). Who dares to challenge it? Here’s Oracle leader Larry Ellison’s attempt to debunk the innovation mantra, which is a pretty powerful piece of messaging in it’s own right, but which was insufficient in defeating Microsoft’s advance into internet computing.
Formlessness on Offense: As Microsoft has expanded its efforts to capture a larger share of the enterprise IT market populated by Sun, Oracle, IBM and others, they’ve articulated a powerful new theme called ‘seamless computing’. The word ‘seamless’, like the word ‘innovation’, is a powerful intangible that implies the problem faced by a world of IT ‘silos’ which do not interoperate to get the right information to the right people at the right time. It provides an intangible expression of the .NET vision in a big way. With this kind of formlessness in it’s arsenal, Microsoft is in position to reverse the verdict on those who have counterposed the concept of ‘open’ against the concept of ‘proprietary’. Microsoft now has the brand ammunition to turn the tables on their rivals, go on the offensive and accuse them of being seamed or proprietary. BEA Systems, a leading independent software provider also focused on the web services market also leverages this kind of brand intangible with their ‘liquid computing’ vision.
Formlessness as Customer Vision: Microsoft has taken the opportunity to leverage their brand building in the SMB space with their McCann-developed campaign around the powerful intangible ‘potential’. In the ‘Your Potential Our Passion’ campaign, Microsoft is basically selling dreams, not software, tapping into the entrepreneurial impulse that is powering the global economy from the US to Asia. It’s hard not to relate to an appeal for realizing your potential.
In addition to Microsoft’s practice of the concept of formlessness in their reputation defense and brand warfare initiatives, they’ve also begun stealing a page from the experiential and/or cult brands in order to beat back the spread of Linux and open source as a potential long term disruptive competitor. It’s called the Shared Source community, and they now have 1 million active IT professional members with direct access to Windows source code. This initiative shows that Microsoft is open to meeting potential asymmetric threats like Linux with unconventional means, in this case, adopting the ‘enemy weapon’ of choice.
The 10 parts of this blog constitute an introductory course in Microsoft's approach to the discipline of what I refer to as asymmetric marketing. While many other tech leaders and natural monopolies have similar approaches to marketing and category leadership, Microsoft stands out as an example of how a tech company with humble beginnings and little financing can leverage pre-emptive strategy, lock-in product models, lock-out business models, R&D-driven market creation initiatives, partner ecosystems, co-evolutionary standards bodies, tribal culture, hands-on leadership, M&A and combat branding to capture and keep an asymmetric advantage over their current and future competitors. The take-away…………have a Microsoft alliance or countermeasures strategy for your company and put your best people onto the battlefield to execute that strategy. As the old saying goes, those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
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