The empire strikes back?

D’OH! I had written the post below, queued it up for today, and published it - and then Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle pointed out that these are not the new ads from Microsoft. Thank goodness. 

I still think that they’re a terrible message, even just appearing on their site; I’d kill them if I were them. Hopefully the upcoming campaign will be more on target; I’m eager to see it. 

Since I hit the publish button, though, I’m not going to take it all back; in the blogosphere, your errors live on. So take the below comments understanding that I know they are not the ads; I think the point is still valid for anyone having to recover from a less than stellar product experience like this. 

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Microsoft, no doubt weary of the anti-Vista sentiment out there, is planning to strike back. Unfortunately, it looks like they may be striking back at their customers. 

Ed Bott at ZDNet caught what seems to be a glimpse of Microsoft’s planned Vista-boosting campaign. Here’s an image he captured:

 

Bott writes:

If this is going to be the overall message of Microsoft’s much-vaunted new $300 million ad campaign, it might be money well spent. According to the folks at LiveSide, the first ads in the new campaign were previewed at Microsoft’s employees-only Global Exchange conference last week to rave reviews. As Tim Anderson astutely noted the other day, “Vista is now actually better than its reputation. That’s a marketing issue.” Microsoft’s biggest challenge is to get would-be customers to set aside whatever preconceptions they have and listen to its pitch for Vista. Aligning its most vocal Vista critics with the Flat Earth Society is a clever way to get people’s attention.

The problem is the follow-up. The banner leads to a page that says:

But we know a few of you were disappointed by your early encounter. Printers didn’t work. Games felt sluggish. You told us—loudly at times—that the latest Windows wasn’t always living up to your high expectations for a Microsoft product.

So, the world was kind of flat. 

If this is really what the new campaign messaging is going to look like, Microsoft appears to be entering a conversation with itself. 

Any campaign for Vista that will work has to acknowledge that people had real concerns - not in landing page copy that downplays those concerns, but right up front. Instead Microsoft appears to be leading with “You were wrong,” and then trying to tell people why. 

Well, maybe people were wrong, and maybe they weren’t, but “you were ignorant” is terrible starting place to change opinions. It’s hard to look at people spitting on a product you’re proud of and not try to corrrect them, but that’s life. 

Years ago I was stuck with a product relaunch: a piece of software that was presented to our customers as the great new thing they all needed, and which met a response which makes Vista’s reception look fabulous. We did not start out by telling customers that they were wrong. 

First, we looked at the customer needs and realized that the new product offered things that were essential for some customers, but added useless complexity for others. (The product was in tune with where the market was going - but a lot of customers weren’t there yet, and were better served by the old product and it’s old technology.)

We did a couple things. First, we ate crow; we stopped trying to push the new product on everyone, we announced upgrades to the old product for those who were happy with it, and reassured them that their beloved workhorse wasn’t going away. 

Second, we refined the messaging for the newer product and were careful to position it as a solution for customers with specific needs. 

Third, the engineers fixed the product - along with addressing nonexistent needs, it also did have some serious problems - and did a soft relaunch. We didn’t change the name (we knew the analysts would hammer us) but we added a suffix to it. We talked about technical changes - which involved acknowledging that things were wrong in the old one. 

Finally, we talked about where we were going beyond the current product set. This has to be done carefully, so it doesn’t seem like you’re trying to just get past the embarrassing failure and stop talking about it, but business customers are looking for the long-term vision and want to know where they will be down the road if they work with you, so its important. 

What we did not do was tell customers who’d had bad experiences with the first incarnation of the new product that they problem was their misperceptions. They’d have abandoned us. 

A final note: Ed Bott’s piece notes that employees have given the new ads rave reviews. Well… who cares? Employees are customers. Of course employees like seeing their work praised. And marketers are happy when coworkers love their creations. But when I read that, it just reinforced my initial impression: Look, Microsoft is talking to itself. 

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